Online Oil Condition Monitoring of Four-Stroke Engine

Abstract

In recent days, Automobiles that make easy transportation of goods play an important role in the economic growth of any country. Transportation necessitates the continuous running of a vehicle without any unwanted break downs. The engine is considered as the heart of an automobile. Vehicle break on may happen due to unexpected or premature failures of some critical parts of an engine. Critical parts of engines are mainly cylinder, piston, crankshaft, timing belt, and clutch. The failure of the above components mainly depends on the lubricating performance of engine oil. Now a day’s oil is being usually replaced based on periodic maintenance schedule designed by vehicle manufacturers. This schedule is framed based on kilometer coverages of vehicles or time period. In this practice, there is the possibility of being oil replaced before completing its life. Even during service work, technicians in the workshop do not follow any method to know the actual condition of oil before replacing it. There is a need for actual driving habits, traffic conditions, engine speed, and load conditions, road conditions (gradients) to predict the condition up to which oil was being utilized. Thus the above is helpful in the prediction of the remaining life of engine oil. This can be done only by monitoring the properties of engine oil continuously during vehicle running. The properties of any lubricating oil are the viscosity, Viscosity index, density, Specific weight, Specific volume, specific gravity, surface tension, and capillarity. Since viscosity place, a vital role in lubrication oil condition can be judged by monitoring it continuously. The monitoring of viscosity helps to identify the actual condition of the oil. This is done by a system that receives signal for the temperature of oil, converts the same into viscosity units and displays it. Therefore vehicle users can identify the exact replacement of engine oil.