The effects of power cylinder design parameters on lube oil consumption of a heavy duty diesel engine

In order to achieve fast and accurate oil consumption measurements, a real-time sulfur tracing method was developed employing a quadrupole mass spectrometer to analyze the sulfur dioxide concentration in the exhaust stream. A sampling system was designed to measure the oil consumption of separate cylinder groups sequentially under identical running conditions. The developed method enables the comparison of oil consumption of separate cylinder groups without disturbing the engine's operation. Using this experimental method, steady-state oil consumption of a turbo-charged heavy-duty diesel engine was measured under various engine operating conditions. The effect of cylinder bore surface texture parameters on total lube oil consumption of the test engine was investigated simultaneously using a cylinder block having dissimilar honing patterns on each cylinder group. The results showed that the lube oil consumption of the engine is significantly affected by the cylinder bore surface roughness. The cylinder sets with high surface roughness demonstrated significantly higher lube oil consumption when the cylinder sets with high and low surface roughness was compared simultaneously.