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In the perspective of fuel saving and emissions reduction, engine oil thermal management has not yet received the attention it deserves. Lubricating oil, in fact, should be the focus of a specific warmup action: the expected benefits is on friction reduction – mechanical efficiency improvement – but also on a positive interaction with the cooling fluid thermal dynamics. The lower thermal capacity of the circulating oil (with respect to the cooling fluid) and the instantaneous reduction of the viscosity due to temperature increase produces a faster engine overall efficiency benefit: this invites to focus specific actions on its thermal management in the direction of speeding up the temperature rise during a cold engine starting.

The benefits introduced by the replacement of conventional centrifugal pumps with volumetric machines for Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) cooling were experimentally and theoretically proven in literature. In particular, Sliding Rotary Vane Pumps (SVRPs) ensure to achieve an interesting reduction of ICEs fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite volumetric pumps are a reference technology for ICE lubrication oil circuits, the application in ICE cooling systems still not represent a ready-to-market solution. Particularly challenging is the case of Heavy-Duty ICE due to the wide operating range the pump covers in terms of flow rate delivered. Generally, SVRPs are designed to operate at high speeds to reduce machine dimensions and, consequently, the weight. Nevertheless, speed increase could lead to a severe penalization of pump performance since the growth of the friction losses.

The need for even more efficient internal combustion engines in the road transportation sector is a mandatory step to reduce the related CO2 emissions. In fact, this sector impacts significantly on greenhouse gases worldwide, and the path toward hybrid and electric powertrains has just begun. In particular, in heavy-duty vehicles the full electrification of the powertrain is far to be considered as a really feasible alternative. So, internal combustion engines will still play a significant role in the near/medium future. Hence, technologies having a low cost to benefits (CO2 reduction) ratio will be favorably introduced in existing engines. Thermal management of engines is today a recognized area of research. Inside this area, the interest toward the lubricant oil has a great potential but not yet fully exploited. Engine oil is responsible of the mechanical efficiency of the engine which has a significant potential of improvement.