A Review of Sub-Scale Test Methods to Evaluate the Friction and Wear of Ring and Liner Materials for Spark-and Compression Ignition Engines; TOPICAL

A review was conducted of past laboratory-scale test methods and to assess their validity for ranking materials and lubricants for use as piston and liner materials in compression-ignition (CI) and spark-ignition (SI) engines. Most of the previous work was aimed at simulating SI engine environments. This report begins with a discussion of the numerous factors that can affect the validity of an approach to simulating engine conditions in a laboratory. These include not only mechanical, chemical and thermal factors, but also human factors as regards how the vehicle is operated and maintained. The next section provides an annotated review of open literature publications that address the issues of laboratory simulation of engine components. A comparison of these studies indicates a lack of sufficient standardization in procedures to enable a systematic comparison of one publication to another. There were just a few studies that compared several laboratory test methods to engine test results, and these indicated that some test methods correlate, at least qualitatively, better than others. The last section provides a series of recommendations for improving the accuracy and validity of laboratory-scale simulations of engine behavior. It became clear that much of the engine wear damage occurs during start-up when the engine is cold, and this calls into the question the usefulness of test methods that attempt to simulate steady-state running conditions. It is recommended that a new standard test method, perhaps developed with the help of the ASTM wear and erosion committee, be developed. It would use cold start-up conditions in the presence of degraded oil, or simulated degraded oil