Effect of oil gallery on the piston thermo-mechanical stresses

The piston is the heart of an engine, which is subjected to thermal and mechanical loading, and due to the fact that it withstands extreme fluctuations in temperature and gas pressure, it is considered a very critical part. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of oil gallery on the thermo-mechanical stresses for XU7JP/L3 engine piston. For this purpose, first Solidworks software was used to model the XU7JP/L3 engine piston. An oil gallery was also created on the piston head. Then ANSYS software was used to analysis the thermo-mechanical stress of the piston. Finally, the effect of the oil gallery on the thermomechanical stress distribution of the piston was studied. Boundary conditions in thermal and mechanical analysis were extracted from one-dimensional simulation in GT-POWER and MATLAB software. The results of the thermal analysis showed that the oil gallery reduces the temperature of the engine piston by about 12°C. The results of the mechanical analysis showed that the Von-Mises stress in the modified piston is reduced by about 13 MPa. To evaluate properly of thermo-mechanical results, the simulated results is compared with real sample of damaged piston and it has been shown that critical identified areas, match well with areas of failure in the real sample.