Surfaces are vital for a range of functions for automotive components. The visual appearance and cleanability of injection moulded plastic parts depend on the control of the polished mould finish. It is also of interest to reduce oil consumption and frictional losses in internal combustion engines, which are heavily influenced by the quality of the cylinder liner surface. The plateau cross-hatch topography of a cylinder liner consists of a system of grooves of different density, width and depth, some parts covered by folded metal, and some parts totally interrupted and unbalanced as a result of imperfection in the honing process. These grooves are critical for good liner function and need to be quickly and objectively quantified for an efficient surface finish development. A suitable way to do this is to use coherence scanning interferometry and to combine profile and image analysis. Thus, the features/parameters, such as honing angle, balance of honing texture, groove interrupts, width, height and distance between grooves, are successively quantified. Here, these parameters, along with areal surface texture parameters in the published ISO specification standard, were used in three case studies. The first case study is on the effect of the folded metal on the surfaces of run truck liners, the second is an evaluation of the improvements of the surface quality introduced by the diamond honing in production of car liners. In addition, based on the significant parameters of the surface, a general characterisation tool for qualifying the surface quality and determination of the required number of measurements is presented. The third case is implementing the methodologies developed for engine liner characterisation for polished tool steels. The case worked well after it had been modified and adapted to these types of surfaces. Also, the scratch patterns on the polished samples, quantified in terms of width and depth, are important parameters that indicate whether the topography of a polished tool steel surface has reached a sufficient quality level, and supports the monitoring of how the polishing steps affect the surface topography © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.

The development of engine components in the automotive industry is governed by several constraints such as environmental legislation and customer expectations. About a half of the frictional losses in an internal combustion engine come from the interactions between the piston assembly and cylinder liner surface. The tribological considerations in the contact between the piston ring and cylinder liner have attracted much attention over the past few decades. Many non-conventional cylinder liner finishes have been, and are being, developed with the aim to reduce friction losses and oil consumption, but the effects of the surface finish on piston ring pack performance is not well understood. One way of reducing friction in the cylinder system is to reduce the tangential load from the piston ring pack, focusing on the oil control ring. However, the side-effect of this is a disappointingly increased oil consumption. In this study a number of different cylinder liner surface specifications were developed and implemented in test engines with the aim of maintaining the level for oil consumption when decreasing the tangential load for the piston ring pack. To improve our understanding of the result, the same surfaces were evaluated in elastic and elasto-plastic rough contact and hydrodynamic flow simulation models. It is shown that oil consumption is strongly related to surface texture on the cylinder liners and at lower speeds (900–1200 rpm), a 'rougher surface' with a high core (e.g. Sk) and valley roughness (e.g. Svk) results in higher oil consumption. At the medium speed range (1200–3600 rpm), oil consumption continues to dominate for the 'rough' surfaces but with a visible influence of a lower oil consumption for a decreased roughness within the 'rough' surface group. 'Smooth' surfaces with a 'smooth' core (Sk), irrespective of the valley component (Svk), show similar oil consumption. For engine speeds above 3600 rpms, an increase in plateau roughness results in higher oil consumption. Throughout the study, standard roughness parameters were computed to compare with the results from engine testing and simulation. Future work will be directed to continuous optimization between oil consumption and friction. Improving the understanding of the functional cylinder system surfaces' ability to form oil films in the cylinder system opens up opportunities, not only in reducing the tangential load of piston ring packs but also in optimizing oil viscosity in order to reduce friction.

It is of common interest to reduce oil consumption and frictional losses in internal combustion engines, which are heavily influenced by the quality of the cylinder liner surface. The plateau cross-hatch topography of a cylinder liner consists of a system of grooves of different density, width and depth, some parts covered by folded metal, and some parts totally interrupted and unbalanced as a result of imperfection in the honing process. These grooves are critical for good liner function, and need to be quickly and objectively quantified for an efficient surface finish development. A suitable way to do this is to use 3D interference measurements and to combine profile and image analysis. Thus, the features/parameters, such as honing angle, balance of honing texture, groove interrupts, width, height, and distance between grooves, are successively quantified. Here, these parameters, along with areal surface texture parameters in the published ISO specification standard were used in two case studies. The first case study is on the effect of the folded metal on the surfaces of run truck liners and the second is an evaluation of the improvements of the surface quality introduced by the diamond honing in production of car liners. In addition, based on the significant parameters of the surface, a general characterisation tool for qualifying the surface quality and determination of the required number of measurements is presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights are reserved.

The way a product or material is experienced by its user could be different depending on the scenario. It is also well known that different materials and surfaces are used for different purposes. When optimizing materials and surface roughness for a certain something with the intention to improve a product, it is important to obtain not only the physical requirements, but also the user experience and expectations. Laws and requirements of the materials and the surface function, but also the conservative way of thinking about materials and colours characterize the design of medical equipment. The purpose of this paper is to link the technical- and customer requirements of current materials and surface textures in medical environments. By focusing on parts of the theory of Kansei Engineering, improvements of the companys' products are possible. The idea is to find correlations between desired experience or «feeling» for a product, -customer requirements, functional requirements, and product geometrical properties -design parameters, to be implemented on new improved products. To be able to find new materials with the same (or better) technical requirements but a higher level of user stimulation, the current material (stainless steel) and its surface (brushed textures) was used as a reference. The usage of focus groups of experts at the manufacturer lead to a selection of twelve possible new materials for investigation in the project. In collaboration with the topical company for this project, three new materials that fulfil the requirements -easy to clean and anti-bacterial came to be in focus for further investigation in regard to a new design of a washer-disinfector for medical equipment using the Kansei based Clean ability approach CAA. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Cylinder liner surface finish controls the frictional losses, oil consumption, and emissions of internal combustion engines to a large extent. In order to minimize such losses, it is important to optimize the liner surface topography by a consistent and more productive finishing process such as slide honing. This process employs diamond abrasives and has been recently introduced in the automotive industry. In this study, its potentials are explored, especially the winning combination of its key process parameters: the base honing pressure and plateau honing time that would yield an optimal liner surface finish. A number of truck engine liners were slide-honed by using different process parameters, samples of the liners were cut, and three-dimensional (3D) surface measurements were taken on a white light interferometer. Then, among others, the (deep honing) groove parameters, specific for liner surfaces, were computed from the measurements for building a large database for comparison and correlation. By simulating the contact and fluid mechanics between the measured liner topographies and a twin land oil control ring under mixed lubrication conditions, the friction mean effective pressure and oil passage rate for a range of engine speeds were calculated. These two parameters represent the liner's function associated with the engine's friction and oil consumption respectively. The results show that the lowest friction and oil flow are highly correlated with surfaces having smoother plateaus and smaller valleys, finished by using lower base honing pressure and longer plateau honing time. High correlations between the 3D roughness parameters were also found, enabling the selection and use of more stable and robust parameters in the quality control of the liner's surface finish. © IMechE 2012.

The presence of the honing scratches/grooves in cylinder liner surfaces is intended and desired as they improve the lubrication and retain the debris reducing the piston assembly/liner friction and consequently improve the fuel economy and longevity of the internal combustion (IC) engines. Axial scratches caused by the abrasive wear between the tribological partners and/or entrained wear particles are undesired since they are correlated with increased oil consumption and noxious emissions of the IC engines. Due to the imperfection of the manufacturing process, the honing grooves, especially the deep ones, are smeared and interrupted by folds. A portion of the folds would eventually detach during the running process and act as abrasive particles increasing the wear in the cylinder. To closely examine the influence of all these features on the liner's function, it emerges a need to objectively quantify the axial wear scratches, plateau honing grooves, deep honing grooves and their interrupts. The existing techniques fail to segment a groove containing interrupts as they usually appear as summits at several locations in the course of the groove. Combining the profile and image analyses, the deep grooves and their interrupts were successfully identified and quantified in earlier works of the authors. In this paper those algorithms are extended, so that the deep honing grooves, plateau honing grooves and axial scratches crossing different depth levels are sequentially segmented in three levels/steps in an immersing way. A number of parameters derived from this method were utilised to compare 3D interference measurements from the top dead centre, middle and bottom region of a liner run in a truck engine test whereas the three regions represent different wear regimes due to the different running conditions. The results show that: (i) the axial scratches are densest in the top dead centre and about the same size as the plateau grooves in all three regions, while in the bottom region there are only few scratches; (ii) the presence of plateau grooves in the top region clearly decreases, (iii) the deep groove interrupt and coverage are lowest in the top region, and (iv) the groove height and distance between grooves spread mostly.

The roughness of stratified surfaces such as cylinder liners, produced by plateau honing, is functionally important in their tribology but is notoriously difficult to characterise. An issue in manufacturing quality control related to their tribological function is the comparative ability of various roughness characterisation systems. In this paper the Rk family of parameters is compared with the Rq family as regards stability and discrimination. When coefficients of variation of the two parameter families are compared as a measure of stability, CVs of individual parameters vary between 8% and 20% but do not seem to indicate a clear advantage to either family. When the correlation of parameters within and between the two groups is computed as a measure of relative discriminative ability, many parameters are found to be highly correlated, to the point where values of Rpk and Rpq are effectively indistinguishable. The relative robustness of the parameters is also established by simulation of surface or measurement artefacts: outlying peaks and valleys, high-frequency noise, changes in stylus or skid radius, changes in high-pass filter and in assessment length. Outlying peaks cause a large increase in Rpk, while outlying valleys have little effect. The Rq parameters are more sensitive to high-frequency noise than the Rk parameters. Increasing the stylus radius reduced the valley parameters, while adding a 25 mm radius skid increased Rk and Rpq by as much as 15%. Increasing the short-wavelength cut-off from 2.5 m to 8 m reduced most parameters, particularly the peak parameters, while replacing the robust Gaussian filter used throughout by a valley-suppression filter had little effect. Finally reducing the assessment length from 17 mm to 4 mm decreased the values of many parameters by up to 11%. Increasing plateau honing time decreased plateau roughness, while increasing pressure during coarse honing increased valley roughness, but these changes could not be correlated with roughness parameters. This suggests that the optimum parameter set has not yet been found. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The presence of the honing scratches/grooves in cylinder liner surfaces is intended and desired as they improve the lubrication and retain the debris reducing the piston assembly/liner friction and consequently improve the fuel economy and longevity of the internal combustion (IC) engines. Axial scratches caused by the abrasive wear between the tribological partners and/or entrained wear particles are undesired since they are correlated with increased oil consumption and noxious emissions of the IC engines. Due to the imperfection of the manufacturing process, the honing grooves, especially the deep ones, are smeared and interrupted by folds. A portion of the folds would eventually detach during the running process and act as abrasive particles increasing the wear in the cylinder. To closely examine the influence of all these features on the liner's function, it emerges a need to objectively quantify the axial wear scratches, plateau honing grooves, deep honing grooves and their interrupts. The existing techniques fail to segment a groove containing interrupts as they usually appear as summits at several locations in the course of the groove. Combining the profile and image analyses, the deep grooves and their interrupts were successfully identified and quantified in earlier works of the authors. In this paper those algorithms are extended, so that the deep honing grooves, plateau honing grooves and axial scratches crossing different depth levels are sequentially segmented in three levels/steps in an immersing way. A number of parameters derived from this method were utilised to compare 3D interference measurements from the top dead centre, middle and bottom region of a liner run in a truck engine test whereas the three regions represent different wear regimes due to the different running conditions. The results show that: (i) the axial scratches are densest in the top dead centre and about the same size as the plateau grooves in all three regions, while in the bottom region there are only few scratches; (ii) the presence of plateau grooves in the top region clearly decreases, (iii) the deep groove interrupt and coverage are lowest in the top region, and (iv) the groove height and distance between grooves spread mostly. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.