The effect of plateau honing on the friction and wear of cylinder liners

Abstract

In case of the diesel engine, the optimal control of interacting surfaces for improving the performance of engine becomes important more than before, especially in designing the surfaces of cylinder liners. The plateau honing technology has been developed on the cylinder liners of the large ship engines and the automotive engines. A plateau honing is a kind of metal removal process, which leaves a substantially flat or plateau finish with much greater bearing area, while maintaining a cross hatch pattern of valleys for oil retention. However, the valley produced by honing functions as an oil repository has a fatal role in the formation of fluid dynamic pressure on interacting surfaces.The friction and wear tests with reciprocating motion were performed to compare the lubricity of sliding cylinder liner surfaces with each different mark of plateau honing. The friction and wear of surfaces with each different depth of profiles, which were used as the honing mark of the marine diesel engine, were compared with those of randomly ground surfaces. From the tests with the deep-grooved honing marks, it was found that the severe interactions due to asperity contacts and the formation of relatively thin films produced larger amounts of wear volumes than the test with the shallow-grooved ones.