Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is the heart of an Automobile. The failure of any critical component of the ICE engine will directly affect the performance of the vehicle. The gaskets are among the many vital parts of an IC engine that are essential in ensuring appropriate sealing to prevent gas and liquid leakage and maintain optimal engine efficiency. Engines use a variety of gasket types to accommodate various sealing requirements. Among them the exhaust manifold gaskets are one of the critical gasket elements in ICE engines. Exhaust Gasket acts as a seal between cylinder head and extremely hot exhaust manifold, which prevents the leakage of hot exhaust gases produced during typical engine operating condition. The gaskets are crucial components because they endure extremely high mechanical loads from the exhaust manifold sliding and banana-shaped bending brought on by thermal expansion, as well as extremely high thermal loads from the high exhaust gas temperatures, which are more than 800°C. These gaskets are additionally subjected to extremely high bolt loads. As the gaskets are made of steel materials, due to the above Thermo-Mechanical loads, there are very high chances for wear out of the gaskets, which affects the performance characteristics & thus efficiency of the engine.
Study of wear phenomenon is very challenging particularly for the gaskets because of nonlinear behavior of geometries, material nonlinearities and in addition, the gaskets are made up of numerous layers with negligible thickness, which makes it further challenging. The wear in Automobile Engine components and particularly in gaskets is an area, which has not been studied extensively. This paper majorly focuses on a computational approach to capturing the wear phenomenon on the gaskets. One of the most critical hot end durability tests of the engine was replicated in a simulation environment by considering all the relevant physics from the physical test. To simulate wear phenomenon, the classical Archard’s wear model was implemented in a UMESHMMOTION Fortran subroutine code and solved in the Finite Element Software ABAQUS/Standard. To consider the removal of material and geometry change due to wear, the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian meshing technique of ABAQUS was used.