INFLUENCE OF DESIGN PARAMETERS ON THE LUBRICATION OF A HIGH SPEED CONNECTING ROD BEARING

For gasoline engines, high speed operation can often be critical for the durability and survival of big-end bearings. When the engine bearings are at the limit of the operating envelope, it is often useful to know the sensitivity of the bearing performance to various options available to the designer.

In this paper, a four cylinder big-end bearing operating at 8,000 and 10,000rpm was taken as a reference for demonstrating the calculated changes in bearing performance. The “SABRE” elasto-hydrodynamic software was used for the predictions which included the effect of the “fitting” of the bearing shells and flexibility of the crank and rod.