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Experimental friction evaluation of cylinder liner/piston ring contact

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DOI: 10.1016/j.wear.2010.08.028

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 Wear 271 (2011) 625–633

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Wear
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wear

Experimental friction evaluation of cylinder liner/piston ring contact

Staffan Johansson a,∗ , Per H. Nilsson a , Robert Ohlsson b , Bengt-Göran Rosén c
a
Volvo Technology AB, Chalmers Science Park, Sven Hultins Gata 9A, SE-412 88 Gothenburg, Sweden
b
Volvo Powertrain AB, Dept 91523, SE-405 08 Gothenburg, Sweden
c
Halmstad University, SET, Box 823, Halmstad University, SE-301 18 Halmstad, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Fuel consumption is an extremely important parameter for the automotive industry today. Anticipated
Received 23 January 2010 emission legislative demands in combination with a rising oil price are true motivators. In engines the
Received in revised form 27 August 2010 piston system is the largest source of frictional losses, accounting for about 50% of the total frictional
Accepted 31 August 2010
losses, thus it is important to optimize. Apart from frictional losses the piston system is a large con-
Available online 25 September 2010
sumer of lubricating oil, a considerable contributor to the total amount of particulate emissions (PM).
New materials, coatings and high-tech machining processes that previously were considered to be too
Keywords:
expensive and therefore only used in complex applications are today becoming more affordable. It is
Wear
Friction
important to develop reliable test methods to study these new concepts. The reciprocating tribometer at
Lubrication Volvo Technology has been updated to better evaluate the frictional difference between material combi-
Cylinder liner nations/surfaces; it is possible to evaluate a number of operational parameters in each experiment. The
Design of experiments components that were studied were a piston ring running against a cylinder liner. Friction, wear and
Tribometer change in surface morphology were studied in the experiments. It is shown that for the introduced DoE
based tribometer test the interaction of dynamic viscosity, velocity and contact pressure can be studied
within one experiment. The results show differences in friction which could be explained as the surface
creating beneficial contact conditions for oil film build-up. It is also apparent that surface roughness is
important regardless of material properties. To better understand the correlations between friction and
surface roughness a future study should include a study of similar materials with different roughness
values.
© 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction cylinder–piston rig interaction area, the properties of the lubricant

In heavy-duty diesel engine development there is a large focus
on decreasing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. One part of
this focus can be accomplished by minimizing the frictional losses
of the engine. The single largest contributor to frictional losses
is the power cylinder unit, accounting for roughly half of the
losses [1]. To measure the frictional losses of the piston system at
full scale is complicated; cycle-to-cycle variation, vibrations, ther-
mal effects and other noise contributing factors often overshadow
frictional differences when examining different engine configura-
tions.
Minimizing friction in the power cylinder unit demands bet-
ter understanding for how the different parameters are linked. In
hydrodynamic lubrication, which is present on the larger part of the
Abbreviations: CTDC, combustion top dead centre; DoE, design of experiments;
LVDT, linear variable differential transformer; MVA, multivariate analysis; VIP, vari-
able importance in the projection (response in MVA).
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +46 31 322 99 66; fax: +46 31 82 08 87.
E-mail address: staffan.sj.johansson@volvo.com (S. Johansson).
are dominant [2]. In mixed and boundary lubrication the surface
texture plays a greater role [3]. A general trend in future heavy-
duty engines is that the peak combustion pressure will increase
[4], this will result in increased frictional losses and wear of com-
ponents.
An alternative step to full-scale experiments is simplified rig
component testing. In such tests it is possible to isolate the com-
ponents of interest and study a particular phenomenon and at the
same time minimize noise factors. In a typical engine a predeter-
mined set of different parameter settings is used to scan (map)
the operational window. In typical tribometer experiments only
one parameter setup is used throughout the experiment duration.
The tribometer was further developed to incorporate a paramet-
ric design-of-experiments approach where the effects of speed,
dynamic viscosity and contact pressure could be evaluated during
the course of a single experiment.
The objective of this work was to develop and verify a method-
ology capable of mimicking the real engine behaviour at boundary
and mixed lubrication regimes in order to minimize frictional losses
and wear. This work focused on the development of test rig method-
ology and to investigate present and future candidate materials.

0043-1648/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wear.2010.08.028
626 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633
Nomenclature
a0 correlation parameter of the Vogel equation
H Hersey parameter, H = N/p
Hv modified Hersey parameter, H v = v/p (m)
N rotational frequency (1/s)
p contact pressure (Pa)
T contact temperature (◦ C)
T1, T2 correction parameters of the Vogel equation (◦ C)
v sliding speed (m/s)
Greek letters
 shear rate (1/s)
c critical shear rate (1/s)
,  dynamic viscosity (Pa s)
∞ dynamic viscosity for high shear rates (Pa s)
0 dynamic viscosity for low shear rates (Pa s)
 oil density (kg/m3 )
 kinematic viscosity (m2 /s)
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Experimental setup
The schematics of the reciprocating eccentric tribometer are
shown in Fig. 1. The component used in the tribometer is a com-
plete piston ring and a segment of the cylinder liner. By using
real production components (as opposed to simplified geometries)
that contain the correct surface morphology, coating thickness and
material composition the best component comparison to the real
engine tests is made.
A three-phase electrical motor provides the motion in the tri-
bometer. The motor is connected via an eccentric and a lever arm
to a carbon fibre sledge. The sledge, which is the housing for the
cylinder liner segment moves in a reciprocating motion. The dis-
placement of the sledge is measured with an LVDT.
A plate fixture is pneumatically loaded onto the sled; this gen-
erates normal force as the liner specimen is loaded onto the upper
specimen (fixed), namely the piston ring. To avoid frictional heating
and wear of the sled an air bearing is fitted onto the plate fixture;
this gives the contact between plate fixture and sled little friction.
The friction force is measured with two piezo electric force
transducers and the normal force is measured with a strain gage
transducer. The sample rate is set to be dependent on the recip-
rocating frequency, each stroke is sampled at 2000 positions (a
reciprocating frequency of e.g. 15 Hz will accordingly be sampled
at 30 kHz).
Fig. 1. Overview of the reciprocating eccentric tribometer.
Fig. 2. Circuit diagram of electrical resistance measurement between piston ring
and cylinder liner.
An unbalanced motion creates unwanted vibrations. The main
method of dealing with vibrations is to fix all components of the
rig onto a sturdy base plate which rests on rubber mountings. The
vibrations are further reduced by having a system of spur gears with
adjustable weights that run in anti-phase with the sledge motion.
A central problem in tribometer experiments it is the geomet-
rical alignment. To minimize the linearity problem a number of
pre-samples were evaluated in order to minimize the linearity
problems before any experimental study is initiated.
The temperature rise is generated from a heat gun, directed at
the liner specimen. This resembles the heating of the piston system
where combustion gases are the main contributors to heating.
To ensure consistent input and output parameters, the displace-
ment of the sled, the normal force acting between cylinder liner and
piston ring and the temperature are controlled using a feedback
loop.
The main cooling mechanism of the piston system in the engine
is the water circulation on the wet side of the cylinder liner. The
cooling is dealt with in the same fashion in the tribometer; a water
coolant channel runs through a channel in the sled. The main advan-
tage of having two systems that counteract the temperature change
is that the parameter stabilizes without difficulty. Since running
parameters settings are changed frequently in the rig it is important
to have a swift convergence of the feedback loop.
Oil is supplied directly to the ring sample holder via a peristaltic
pump. Because of the pump being volumetric it will always pump
the same amount of oil per time segment. For this testing the pump
delivers a constant amount of 0.4 ml/min throughout the experi-
ment; this mimics the starved lubrication conditions at combustion
top dead centre (CTDC).
The tribometer acts as a circuit where the contact between the
piston ring and the cylinder liner acts as a potentiometer. The pur-
pose of the electrical resistance measurement is mainly to quantify
the oil film thickness although oxide formation and oil additive
deposits also alter the resistive signal.
The circuit is fed with a current Uf of 50 mV DC (see Fig. 2). Rcontact
symbolizes the electrical resistance through the asperity contact of
 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633 627

tions within the piston system [5,6]. Reynolds average equation

Fig. 3. Engine friction power loss of top piston ring for 1200 rpm, 50%, 75% and full
load. The dashed box indicates the CTDC area where the largest friction power loss
is found.
the piston ring and the cylinder liner and/or the oil film. The volt-
age Ucontact is linearly correlated with Rcontact , this voltage is used
to represent the electrical resistance in further analysis, it is later
sections referred to as resistive coefficient. R1 is a potentiometer
with fixed discrete levels. For this arrangement to work soundly the
value of Rcontact and R1 should be of the same magnitude, even if
Rcontact fluctuates on each stroke as transitions of lubrication regime
occurs. The value of R1 is determined by running an initial exper-
iment (using the same setup of parameters proposed for the test
series) to confirm that the signal can be quantified for all running
conditions during the duration of the experiment.
2.2. DoE experimental setup and tribometer parametric
description
was used to determine the oil film thickness.
The aim of this study was to minimize the frictional losses. By
studying the frictional power losses using piston simulation it was
found that the highest loss due to mechanical contact is related to
the top ring and occurs close to CTDC, at around 15–30 crank angle
degrees (see Fig. 3).
The purpose of the tribometer friction study was to mimic the
piston ring/cylinder liner contact in the engine, it was however not
possible in a simplified tribometer experiment to utilize the same
speeds, loads and temperatures as can be found in the engine. The
objective was thus to find a parameter that can compare the contact
of the top piston ring against the cylinder liner in the engine and in
the tribometer. The parameter that is used for this comparison is
the Hersey parameter [7]; a combination of global contact pressure,
dynamic viscosity and velocity. The Hersey parameter was defined
with rotational frequency as velocity parameter, since a reciprocat-
ing motion is studied a modified version of the Hersey Parameter
is used incorporating point speed as velocity parameter.
The face profile of the piston ring had a shape of an unsymmetri-
cal barrel. This meant that normal Herzian theory based on simpler
geometry was not applicable; instead a linear elastic method [8]
was used to solve the pressure for the unsymmetrical geometry.
The correlation between contact load and contact pressure is not
linear (see Fig. 4) so it was needed to determine the contact pressure
for each specific contact load. Using the radial load, which was cal-
culated with piston simulation it was possible to solve the contact
pressure at all crank angle degrees for the top piston ring/cylinder
liner contact.
Using the oil film thickness calculated with piston simulation it
was possible to calculate the shear ratio. To retrieve the dynamic
viscosity the Vogel (Eq. (1)) and Cross (Eq. (2)) equation were solved
[9]. Since the oil film thickness in the tribometer experiments was
not measured the dynamic viscosity could not be calculated using
the Cross equation, instead the relation between kinematic viscos-
ity and density had to be used (Eq. (3)) [10].

The experimental plan used in the tribometer study is  T1 

shown in Table 1. This table shows the DoE approach with 0 = a0 exp (1)
T2 + T
high and low level of input parameters; temperature, fre-
quency and load. The parameters dynamic viscosity, sliding  0 − ∞
velocity and pressure are then calculated from the original  = ∞ + (2)
1 + |/c |
parameters (for details of calculation ahead in this section).
The test plan incorporates a parametric design-of-experiments
=× (3)
approach were the effects of sliding velocity, dynamic viscosity
and contact pressure can be evaluated during the experi-
ments. A good comparison between the calculated Hersey parameter
To ensure an accurate comparison between the engine and the of the engine and the tribometer was found, as can be seen in Fig. 5.
tribometer the first step was to find the engine parameters for the The rig settings used (red dots) correspond to the crank angle inter-
tribological contact; these parameters were retrieved from sim- val of 3–28◦ for full load and 3–22◦ for 50% load (blue curve). It is
ulated values. “Piston Simulation” was used for this task, it is a approximately at this crank angle interval that the frictional power
software developed dedicated to solve the force and contact equa- loss is highest (see Fig. 3).

Table 1
Experimental cycle used in tribometer experiments. Running-in stage is defined as the first stage (duration 180 min).

Step no. Time (min) Oil temperature (◦ C) (dynamic viscosity (Pa s)) Reciprocating frequency (Hz) (sliding velocity (m/s)) Load (N) (contact pressure (Pa))

1 180 91 (1.47E−02) 10 (0.6) 259 (9.86E+07)

2 30 79 (2.01E−02) 5 (0.3) 150 (6.91E+07)
3 30 79 (2.01E−02) 15 (0.9) 150 (6.91E+07)
4 30 112 (9.23E−03) 5 (0.3) 150 (6.91E+07)
5 30 112 (9.23E−03) 15 (0.9) 150 (6.91E+07)
6 30 91 (1.47E−02) 10 (0.6) 259 (9.86E+07)
7 30 79 (2.01E−02) 5 (0.3) 473 (1.41E+08)
8 30 79 (2.01E−02) 15 (0.9) 473 (1.41E+08)
9 30 112 (9.23E−03) 5 (0.3) 473 (1.41E+08)
10 30 112 (9.23E−03) 15 (0.9) 473 (1.41E+08)
11 30 91 (1.47E−02) 10 (0.6) 259 (9.86E+07)
628
Fig. 4. The contact pressure as a function of piston ring position and contact load.
2.3. Materials
Three different cylinder liner materials were exam-
ined:Reference material; Gray cast iron (REF), plateau honed.
• Surface parameter Sa = 0.46 ± 0.04 ␮m.
Standard gray cast iron with additional heat treatment (MATE-
RIAL1), plateau honed.
• Surface parameter Sa = 0.71 ± 0.04 ␮m.
Thermally sprayed material (MATERIAL2), single stage honed.
• Surface parameter Sa = 0.28 ± 0.01 ␮m.
The roughness values of Sa (above) were based on the surface
measurement prior to the experiment. MATERIAL2 was different
compared to the other materials; the valley part of this material
consists of a porous isotropic structure (common for thermally
sprayed materials). REF and MATERIAL1 were plateau honed with
a honing angle of 54◦ . The counterpart in these experiments was
a PVD (CrN) coated top piston ring. Fresh 15W40 oil was used in
the experiments. Each combination was represented by the mean
of five experimental repetitions.
Fig. 5. The correlation between Hersey parameter from engine tribometer for the investigated top piston ring/cylinder liner contact. Line indicates Hersey number of engine,
circle indicates average value of tribometer test cycle.
S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633
2.4. Roughness characterisation
To enable the link to function a characterization of the surface is
needed. Surfaces were measured using a chromatic confocal probe
that scanned the surfaces in three dimensions [11]. The surfaces
used for evaluation had the dimension of 1.75 mm × 1.75 mm with
a 2 ␮m spacing. There were four roughness measurements con-
ducted per tribometer experiment; two were located at the centre
of the stroke and two at one of the reversal zones. The value used
in the evaluation was the mean of these four measurements (two
measured before and two measured after the experiment). Surfaces
were characterized by using the complete set of 3D parameters
described in standards ISO 25178 and EUR 15178N [12]. All sur-
faces were filtered using a robust Gaussian filtering with a cut-off
length of 0.5 mm prior to the calculation of the surface roughness
parameters.
By using the complete sets of parameters numerous properties
of a measured surface was characterized such as spatial fea-
tures, texture direction, roughness at different surface amplitude
etc.
2.5. Wear characterisation
Wear was evaluated by measuring the complete worn sur-
face, before and after experiment. The surfaces measured for wear
evaluation purposes were 48 mm (axial direction, direction of
motion) × 10 mm (tangential direction) with a lateral resolution of
10 ␮m. The surfaces of the cylinder liner sample are averaged in
the tangential direction; this returns a profile of the wear depth in
 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633 629

of friction could be found in the reversal points and lowest at mid

Fig. 6. Example of quantification of wear depth. Profiles of original and worn surface
averaged in tangential direction as seen in this figure.
stroke (see Fig. 7, left). The frictional behaviour was expected since
the tribometer experiments were intended to analyze the boundary
and mixed lubrication regimes.
To obtain a representative value of friction coefficient the vari-
ations of friction coefficient over the stroke is averaged (see Fig. 8,
left). It was important to compare the frictional responses of cycle
steps regardless of the cycle step occurring in the beginning or
towards the end of the experiment, it is thus crucial to remove
running-in trends from experimental step 2–11. In order to com-
pensate for the running-in effects two linear functions (vectors) are
subtracted from the specific parts of original friction values (see
Fig. 8, right), one acting on the high-load cycle steps (DoE stage
7–11) and one working on the all steps, apart from the first 150 of
the running-in period. The reason as to why two functions were
subtracted from the original friction values was that the running-
in effects (commonly a decrease in friction) were more apparent in
the experimental steps with high contact pressure (step 7–10) in
comparison to the experimental steps with lower contact pressure
(step 2–5).

the axial direction. Wear volume was calculated by subtracting the
original profile with the profile of the worn surface (see Fig. 6).
2.6. Friction characterisation
Friction was continuously measured in the tribometer experi-
ments. During the stroke the friction varies, hawing highest value
2.7. Multivariate analysis
With multivariate analysis (MVA), one can investigate the rela-
tions between all variables in a single context. In this MVA approach
four approaches are examined. The statistical analysis tool used in
this study was Simca-P 10.0. In this study a linear correlation is used
to study the responses between input and output variables. In all

Fig. 7. Measurement of friction coefficient in tribometer. Left: An example of one friction coefficient measurement over one stroke. The highest friction can be found at the
reversal points (position coordinate 400, 950, 1100 and 1800), the lowest friction can be found at mid stroke (position coordinates 600 and 1550). Right: Friction coefficient
measurement of one experiment showing both the variations over the stroke length as well as the variations over the experimental duration. After the running-in stage
(180 min) the friction coefficient changes for each experimental cycle step.

Fig. 8. Average friction coefficient over all experimental cycle steps. Left: Friction graph and the two levelling vectors plotted against time. Right. Original friction graph,
friction graph after first levelling and friction graph after second levelling plotted against time.
630 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633

Fig. 9. Left: Cylinder liner average wear depth of the studied materials. Right: Surface roughness parameter Rq [␮m] of piston ring, after experiment, measured inside of the
wear mark. The error bars represent the standard deviation of the five experiments.

Fig. 10. Average friction coefficient including running-in stage (left) and excluding running-in stage (right). The error bars represent the standard deviation of the five
experiments.

analyzes the coefficients representing input parameters are scaled
and centred.
3. Results
3.1. Wear
Initial “running-in” wear of the cylinder liner is concentrated
to the top (plateau) part of the liner surface. In Fig. 9, the average
liner wear is visualized for the three investigated material com-
binations; there was a significant difference in average liner wear
depth. Compared to the stabile reference material (REF) wear depth,
MATERIAL1 shows both a 100% increase in average wear depth as
well as 400% increase of variation width (the error bars in Fig. 9 rep-
resents ± one standard deviation of five experiments). MATERIAL2
shows a more than halved average wear depth and also decreased
variation. From a previous study [13] it was shown that it was ben-
eficial to quantify wear on the top piston ring using the profile
parameter Rq [␮m] (ISO 4287 [14]). The Rq [␮m] values (Fig. 9,
right) are based on five profiles measured inside of the wear mark

Fig. 11. Loading scatter plot of MODEL1. It can be observed that the friction coefficient correlates to the experimental parameters Velocity.
 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633 631

0,30

CoeffCS[3](Mean Resistance Coefficient)

0,20 0,40

CoeffCS[3](MeanFriction Coeff)
0,10
0,00 0,20

-0,10
0,00
-0,20
-0,30
-0,20
-0,40
-0,50
-0,40
-0,60
-0,70 -0,60
REF

MATERIAL1

MATERIAL2

Dynamic Viscosity

Velocity

Contact Pressure

REF

MATERIAL1

MATERIAL2

Dynamic Viscosity

Velocity

Contact Pressure
Fig. 12. MODEL1. Left: Coefficient plot for average friction coefficient. Right: Coefficient plot for average resistive coefficient. The error bars in the coefficient plots represents
95% confidence interval.

0,00 0,00
0,20
-0,10 -0,10
CoeffCS[1](Mean

CoeffCS[1](Mean

CoeffCS[1](Mean
-0,20 0,00
-0,20
Friction Coeff)

Friction Coeff)

Friction Coeff)
-0,30 -0,20 -0,30
-0,40
-0,50 -0,40 -0,40
-0,60 -0,60 -0,50
-0,70
-0,60
-0,80 -0,80
-0,90 -0,70

Dynamic Viscosity
Dynamic Viscosity

Velocity
Dynamic Viscosity

Velocity
Velocity

Contact Pressure
Contact Pressure
Contact Pressure

Fig. 13. Coefficient plots for describing the correlation between dynamic viscosity, velocity and contact pressure on mean friction coefficient for the three investigated
materials. Left: REF. Centre: MATERIAL1. Right: MATERIAL2. The error bars in the coefficient plots represents 95% confidence interval.

measured after the experiment. The difference of the piston ring Rq running-in stage does not alter the friction coefficient significantly,
is insignificant due to the overlap of the variations. only a small decrease can be observed.

3.2. Friction measurement

3.3. Multi variate analysis of the combined correlations between
The average friction coefficient over the entire test cycle for the friction, resistive coefficient and surface roughness parameters
three combinations is shown in Fig. 9, the error bar marks one
standard deviation. With this coarse approach differences between Using MVA four different models were analysed to study the
MATERIAL1, REF and MATERIAL2 can be clearly observed. The correlations between input and output parameters:

0,150
CoeffCS[1](Mean
Friction Coeff)

0,100

0,050

0,000
Vvv
Vmc

Sa

Sk
Sxp

Sdc

Fig. 14. Coefficient plot describing the correlation of surface roughness parameters and mean friction coefficient. The error bars in the coefficient plots represents 95%
confidence interval.
632 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633
• MODEL1: Input parameters: Material type, dynamic viscosity,
velocity and contact pressure in relation to output parameters:
average resistive coefficient and average friction coefficient.
• MODEL2: This model is similar to previous model but with the
difference that each material type is treated separately. Input
parameters: dynamic viscosity, velocity and contact pressure in
relation to output parameter: average friction coefficient.
• MODEL3: Input parameters: All surface roughness parameters
(see) in relation to output parameter: average friction coefficient
Fig. 11 shows the loading scatter plot for MODEL1. It can clearly
be seen that mean friction coefficient anti-correlates to all the input
parameters. Fig. 12 shows the coefficient values for all parameters
for MODEL1 (the values are scaled and centred). It can be observed
that the frictional signal is dependent on both material type and
experimental settings but resistive coefficient is only dependent
on material type. This means that frictional changes cannot be
quantified with resistive signal when different material types are
examined.
Fig. 13 shows the coefficients for the three models (MODEL2).
MATERIAL2, which exhibit the lowest friction coefficient (see
Fig. 10) also shows the clearest dependence of dynamic viscosity
and velocity. In other words, MATERIAL2 has the possibility to gen-
erate a friction reducing oil film were REF and MATERIAL1 fails.
In Fig. 12 left the pressure shows the same behaviour as dynamic
viscosity and velocity, as the pressure increases, friction decreases.
MODEL3 describes the correlations between surface roughness
parameters and mean friction coefficient. The total number of sur-
face roughness parameters in this model was large (48 in total),
since a multitude of these parameters showed a correlation to
mean friction coefficient the parameter set were reduced to include
only the parameters with the highest correlation to friction. Fig. 14
shows the six parameters that both had the largest absolute coef-
ficient value as well as the largest model importance (also known
as VIP values1 ). These selected parameters have the highest cor-
relation to mean friction coefficient in comparison to the total
number of surface roughness parameters in MODEL3. The resulting
six parameters were divided into three groups that each describe
similar a characteristic of the surface that is necessary to decrease
friction:
• Properties relating to the plateau part of the surface amplitude
• A smooth plateau part of the surface amplitude (surface rough-
ness parameter Sk)
• A small height of the core (in reference to the material ratio
curve) of the surface (surface roughness parameter Sdc (limits
p = 10%, q = 80%)
• A small material volume of the core (in reference to the material
ratio curve) of the surface (surface roughness parameter Vmc
(limits p = 10%, q = 80%))
• Properties relating to the valley part of the surface amplitude
• A small void volume of the valleys (surface roughness param-
eter Vvv (limit p = 80%)) and a small amplitude of the valleys
(surface roughness parameter Sxp (p = 50% q = 97.5%)
• Small total surface amplitude (surface roughness parameter Sa).
4. Discussion
The wear measured on the cylinder liner surface is small (wear
depth of MATERIAL2 is<100 nm), both in comparison to real wear
and comparison to the total surface amplitude. On top of this the
friction coefficient shows only small change for the running-in
1
The VIP values (variable importance in the projection) reflect the importance of
terms in the model both with respect to Y and with respect to X (the projection).
period for all investigated materials (Fig. 10). A future tribometer
study should include experiments with representative wear levels
as well as a quantification of friction that is beyond the running-in
period.
Running-in causes a decrease in friction during the experiment
duration; however, effects associated with running-in can also be
seen in the experimental cycle steps of 30 min (see Fig. 8). It is of
importance to measure a stable friction signal thus the cycle step
duration should be increased in future experiments.
There is a discrepancy between the experimental results in
Fig. 12 and the expected “Stribeck” [7] behaviour for the bound-
ary and mixed lubrication regimes. Typically friction coefficient
decreases with a decrease in contact pressure in said regimes. How-
ever, support for this result can be found in [15] but further studies
are required to confirm these findings.
There is no correlation between resistive coefficient and the
parameters velocity, dynamic viscosity and contact pressure. How-
ever, the resistance coefficient shows an excellent correlation to
material type (see Fig. 12). One reason for this might be that the
conductivity of the different materials overshadows the frictional
differences.
Since the total number of investigated surface roughness param-
eters is large (48 roughness parameter prior to the reduction) and
many of the parameter inter-correlates a future study to remove
the redundant parameters can be beneficial [16].
From the analysis of the surface roughness parameters correla-
tion to friction it could be shown that:
• Small value of surface roughness parameter Sxp indicates sur-
faces with small sharp peaks removed i.e. pre-run-in surfaces are
beneficial.
• A surface with a small plateau amplitude (surface roughness
parameter Sk, Sds and Vmc) decreases friction in boundary and
mixed lubrication regime.
• Parameters that describes the valley part of the surface (sur-
face roughness parameter Vvv and Sxp) also shows a correlation
to friction. Before any conclusions can be drawn from this it is
important to verify that there is no internal correlation between
the roughness parameters describing the plateau amplitude of
the surface and the roughness parameters that describes the val-
ley amplitude of the surface.
• Small value of surface roughness parameter Sa indicates that
besides a low plateau roughness amplitude also the amount of
high peak areas and low valley areas is minimized. Especially high
peaks can cause oil film penetration and less favorable frictional
regimes.
5. Conclusions
The purpose of the tribometer experiment has been to mimic
the conditions at TDC in the contact between cylinder liner and
top piston ring. The following conclusions can be drawn from the
experimental results:
• It is shown that for the introduced DoE based tribometer test the
interaction of dynamic viscosity, velocity and contact pressure
can be studied within one experiment.
• For a material/surface with lower friction (MATERIAL2) the
importance of dynamic viscosity and velocity increases. For a
material/surface with higher friction only contact pressure is of
importance. This means that a surface has to be able to generate
conditions for oil film build-up, if this is not accomplished the
properties of oil and the velocity has little (REF) or no (MATE-
RIAL1) significance.
 S. Johansson et al. / Wear 271 (2011) 625–633
• For the materials studied in this work it is apparent that sur-
face roughness is important in the mild wear situation regardless
of material properties, this is accurate for boundary and mixed
lubrication regime. It can be clearly seen that all part of the
surface amplitude should be minimized to decrease friction, how-
ever, due to the multitude of surface roughness parameters that
shows a significant correlation to friction it is difficult to draw
conclusions of what surface characteristic (e.g. plateau or valley
amplitude) that is of most importance to decrease friction.
6. Suggestions for further work
• To better understand the correlations between friction and sur-
face roughness a future study must include a study of similar
materials with different roughness values.
• The wear amounts reported in the study are rather small in com-
parison to the normal wear found in an operating engine. Also,
the change in friction during the running-in experimental step is
quite small for all investigated materials. A future study should
also include an accelerated test procedure with higher liner wear
levels and clearer differences in the piston ring surface rough-
ness after experiment as well as a quantification of friction that
is beyond the running-in period.
• A future study should include a full-scale validation of tribometer
test approach presented in this paper.
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