Evaluation of the Plateau Honing on the Friction and Wear Cylinder Liners in Agricultural Tractors

To enhance the fuel efficiency of the engines of agricultural tractors, the optimal control of interacting surfaces for improving engine performance becomes extremely significant, especially in developing the surface of cylinder liners. Therefore, plateau honing technology was designed on the cylinder liner of automotive and tractor engines. A substantially flat or plateau is left on the sliding surfaces along with more bearing areas, although a cross hatch model of valleys is kept for retaining oil. On the contrary, the created valley by honing functions as an oil repository can negatively affect creating fluid dynamic pressure on the surfaces. Accordingly, a better understanding of generated surfaces during plateau honing is essential for optimizing process. To this end, some experiments were performed on a cylinder liner of the Perkins 4-248 engine (related to the Massey Ferguson 285 tractor) which was manufactured by Keyhan Sanat Ghaem Company. Then, friction and wear tests with reciprocating motions were conducted to compare the lubricity of sliding cylinder liner surfaces with each different mark of plateau honing. Then, a comparison was made between the friction and wear of the surfaces including various depth of profiles, which were used as the honing mark of the agricultural tractors diesel engine, and those which had randomly ground surfaces. Based on this study results, higher amounts of wear volumes were produced by creating more interactions from asperity contacts and relatively thin films, compared to the test with the shallow-grooved honing marks.