A Review of Experimental Tribological Investigations of Piston Ring with Laser Surface Textured Dimples

Abstract

In an automobile internal combustion engine plays a vital role but the efficiencies like thermal and mechanical efficiency of an internal combustion engine is relatively low. It is due to dissipation of large part of its fuel energy in the form of heat loss and loss for overcoming the friction. The friction between the piston ring and cylinder liner pair, rotating engine bearings, valve train etc. is responsible for the power loss in an engine. The attempts to reduce the friction between these interacting surfaces leads to the advantages like reduction in consumption of fuel, high power output, reduction in consumption of oil, reduction in exhaust emissions etc. The reduction of friction as well as wear can be achieved by the proper lubrication and proper surface treatment of the interacting components. The surface modification technique like laser surface texturing (LST) is mostly used for improving the tribological performance of interacting surfaces. Therefore the effect of laser surface textured dimples especially on piston ring surface to evaluate the performance of piston ring and cylinder liner tribological pair should be studied properly. Most of the researches carried out the theoretical study about this but very few have carried out the experimental investigations about the tribological evaluation of ring and liner pair. In this research work the review of the experimental work done for tribological investigation of piston ring with laser surface textured dimples on outer surface of ring and cylinder liner interface by various researchers was carried out. The review work in this paper describes the effect of various dimple parameters like shape, size and depth of dimple, area ratio load, speed etc. on the tribological performance of the ring and liner interface.