An oil monitoring method of wear evaluation for engine hot tests

Abnormal wear of a piston ring-cylinder liner pair may happen after 9 min hot tests of internal combustion engines, while the engine performance parameters were within predetermined threshold ranges. Few differences were observed among oil samples from the engines with or without abnormal wear in the spectrometric and Kittiwake Analex PQ analysis. Therefore, a manual confirmation by disassembling the oil pan was often required. In this work, an oil monitoring method for wear evaluation of the engines was proposed. The oil samples were rapidly analyzed on site by on-line visual ferrograph (OLVF). For the abnormal engines, it was found that the index of particle coverage area (IPCA), characterizing the wear debris concentration, was low. Moreover, large debris was rarely observed on OLVF ferrograms, which was consistent with the results obtained from analytical ferrography, and the reason was analyzed and discussed. In addition, an on-site abnormal wear evaluation procedure for the 9 min hot tests was proposed based on a trained Naive Bayes Classifier. As observed from the results of 27 engines, 4 abnormal engines were found. Among one of them, longitudinal scratches were found on the cylinder wall, which were evaluated as abnormal wear by the classifier. This method can cut down the quantity of disassembly inspection and is more efficient.