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A study was conducted to understand the effects the specifications of the crank-slider mechanism have on piston friction losses. The information obtained through the study is believed to be useful information for reducing the piston friction. A single-cylinder spark-ignited gasoline engine was designed and constructed to have not only a real-time piston friction measurement system using the floating liner method, but also provisions to facilitate changing the specifications of the crank-slider mechanism. This paper describes the study results obtained under various engine-operating conditions and reports the parametric test results of three crank ratios and five crankshaft-offset amounts tested.

Experiment results were compared with computation analysis results for torsional vibration on a crankshaft system with/without a torsional viscous damper on a six-cylinder in-line type turbocharged diesel engine and a V type ten-cylinder naturally-aspirated diesel engine respectively. At first, the boundary conditions for boundary element method (BEM) model were determined to estimate the torsional stiffness of the crank-throws of the crankshafts. Then, the estimated stiffness was used to calculate the natural frequencies of the torsional vibration without the damper by dynamic stiffness matrix method. As a result, the calculated natural frequencies approximately agreed with the measured ones. Finally, the torsional vibration with the damper was analyzed by using the dynamic stiffness matrix method and complex viscous damping coefficients for the damper. The calculated torsional amplitudes and resonant engine speeds agreed with the experiment results.

A method for reducing friction loss in the engine timing chain was investigated using multi-body dynamics simulation. The method known as the link-by-link model was employed in the simulation to enable representation of the behavior of each single link of the chain and its friction due to contact. In order to predict the friction under actual engine operating conditions, a model that takes camshaft torque fluctuation and crankshaft rotational speed fluctuation into account was created. This simulation was used to verify the detailed distribution of friction in each part of the chain system as well as the changes of friction in the time domain. As a result, it was found that the sliding friction in the chain tensioner guide and chain guide was larger than in other locations. Based on this result, a method of reducing friction entirely by measures in mechanisms and structures without relying on low-friction materials was investigated.