Isothermal transient analysis of piston skirt-to-cylinder wall contacts under combined axial, lateral and tilting motion

The paper describes the combined axial, lateral and tilting motions of piston within the confine of cylinder bore, with sliding and normally approaching and separating contacts between the piston skirt and the cylinder wall on both the major and minor thrust sides. The methodology developed undertakes combined solution for inertial dynamics of the piston, together with transient elastohydrodynamic analysis of both contacts. It also includes important practical features of the contacting surfaces, such as the axial form relieving of the piston skirt profile. The space–time solver uses Newmark β-type time marching integrator, as well as the effective influence Newton–Raphson method for space-domain solution of the elastohydrodynamic conjunctions in each step of time. This approach, not hitherto reported for this type of conforming contacts yields accurate predictions of lubricant film thickness and pressure distribution within computationally acceptable times, given the inclusion of level of detail in the model.