The Effect of the Addition of Hard Particles on the Wear of Liner and Ring Materials Running with High Sulfur Fuel

The components of the piston/ring/liner system must have their wear resistance increased to meet the new engine requirements. The engine operating conditions can be even worse if corrosive wear in the engine is expected to occur.

This paper presents a study to improve the wear resistance of piston ring coatings and liner materials by the addition of chromium carbide and carbide forming alloying elements, respectively. The engine tests were run with high sulfur fuel (about 1.0 wt%) and lubricant with low total base number (TBN) with the objective of increasing the corrosive conditions.

The results show the improvement of the ring coatings wear resistance with the increase of the chromium carbide content. The cylinder liner materials also presented lower wear rates when they had hard particles, mainly due to the addition of niobium, vanadium and titanium.