Development of a piston secondary motion model for skirt friction analysis

A comprehensive piston skirt lubrication and secondary motion model that can be used for piston friction simulations was developed based on Greenwood and Tripp's surface asperity contact model and Patir and Cheng's modified Reynolds equation with surface flow factors. Oil flow between the skirt-liner clearances was modeled and hydrodynamic and asperity contact pressures around the skirt were calculated. Reynolds boundary conditions were applied to determine the film rupture boundaries and wetted areas. Surface roughness and roughness orientation were included in the model. Due to its important effect on pressure development in the oil film, change in the skirt profile due to elastic deformations was taken into account. Change of the skirt profile due to piston thermal expansion is also calculated using the steady-state temperature distribution of the piston corresponding to the investigated engine running conditions. A piston stiffness matrix obtained by finite element analysis was used to determine the elastic deformations of the piston skirt under the calculated oil film pressures. A two-degree-of-freedom system is formed with the forces and moments calculated by the lubrication model. These forces and moments require a coupled solution with piston position. This is achieved by applying an iterative numerical procedure based on Broyden's scheme which seeks force and moment balance at each iteration phase making use of time step variation. The effects of various engine operating conditions and piston design parameters on piston secondary motion were investigated. Piston skirt friction force due to hydrodynamic shear forces and metal-to-metal contact is calculated.