A New Two-Piece Oil Control Ring with Enhanced Conformability

The two major working characteristics of the oil control ring are: to scrape the lubricant oil from the bore wall in the direction of the crankcase and to maintain a sufficient amount of lubricant oil to the compression rings above it in order to sustain a suitable lubricant film thickness between the rings and the bore. The oil control ring efficiency is the outcome of the combination of the following parameters: the conformability, the pressure against the bore wall, the sort of the contact between the ring and the bore, and the oil scraping dynamics. A new oil control ring, called Monoland®, designed to enhance conformability by making its radial wall more flexible without raising its tangential load is presented in this paper. Moreover, this new ring profile enables the reduction of the tangential load without reducing contact pressure and conformability thus ensuring an ample oil consumption performance with low friction loss.