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Engine oil with viscosity lower than 0W-16 has been needed for improving fuel efficiency in the Japanese market. However, lower viscosity oil generally has negative aspects with regard to oil consumption and anti-wear performance. The technical challenges are to reduce viscosity while keeping anti-wear performance and volatility level the same as 0W-20 oil. They have been solved in developing a new engine oil by focusing on the molybdenum dithiocarbamate friction modifier and base oil properties. This paper describes the new oil that supports good fuel efficiency while reliably maintaining other necessary performance attributes.

Recently, automotive engines have been operating under harsh conditions of high-power, low viscosity oil and increase of start-stop (e.g. idling stop). In plain bearing used within engine, as oil film thickness decreases, the frequency of direct contacts on the sliding surfaces between the shaft and the bearing are gradually increasing. In fact, the plain bearings for engines would tend to be used under mixed lubrication and the contacts of the surface roughness asperities sometimes occur between the shaft and the bearing. As a result, the bearing wear on the sliding surfaces is accelerated by the contacts of the roughness asperities. In order to predict the bearing performance exactly, it is very important to understand the change progress of the geometric shape of sliding surfaces caused by the wear.

A block-on-ring friction and wear testing machine (LFW-1) was used as a test method for making fundamental evaluations of the effect of the Belt-Drive Continuously Variable Transmission(B-CVT) fluid on the friction coefficient between the belt and pulleys. The results confirmed that this method can simulate the friction phenomena between the belt and pulleys of an actual transmission. The mechanism whereby ZDDP and some Ca detergents improve the torque capacity of a B-CVT was also investigated along with the effect of the deterioration of these additives on the friction coefficient. It was found that these additives form a film, 80-90 nm in thickness, on the sliding surface, which is effective in increasing the friction coefficient. The friction coefficient declined with increasing additive deterioration. The results of a 31P-NMR analysis indicated that the decline closely correlated with the amount of ZDDP in the B-CVT fluid.

Properties of engine bearings were investigated with different bearing materials and different HTHS viscosity oils by means of both an engine test and a rig test. The rig test well simulated the bearing wear which occurred in the engine test. Lead-bronze bearings with lead-tin-indium overlay gave the least amount of wear in operating under high speed and heavy load conditions even with low HTHS viscosity oil. Aluminum bearings without overlay gave good wear resistance in the case of no seizure occurrence. The wear amount of bearings were well correlated with HTHS viscosity, not with kinematic viscosity.

Many studies have been reported concerning fundamental tribological research aimed at reducing the severe valve train wear that occurs in internal combustion engines. In this paper, cam follower wear was theoretically and experimentally analyzed at the material development stage. Statistical methods have been applied to practical use in determining the material properties quantitatively. Based on the results, a method for predicting cam follower wear has been derived which has made it possible to develop new valve train systems more efficiently. Further, a guideline for developing new wear resistant materials was also clarified. Finally, the precision high chrominum cast iron rocker arm is described, along with its application to a new NISSAN high-performance 4-cylinder DOHC engine, as an example of the use of this method to develop new wear-resistant materials.

Research is under way on an engine system [1] that achieves a variable compression ratio using a multiple-link mechanism between the crankshaft and pistons for the dual purpose of improving fuel economy and power output. At present, there is no database that allows direct judgment of the feasibility of the specific sliding parts in this mechanism. In this paper, the feasibility was examined by making a comparison with the sliding characteristics and material properties of conventional engine parts, for which databases exist, and using evaluation parameters based on mixed elasto-hydrodynamic (EHD) lubrication calculations. In addition, the innovations made to the mixed EHD calculation method used in this study to facilitate calculations under various lubrication conditions are also explained, including the treatment of surface roughness, wear progress and stiffness around the bearings.

It was found that pitting resistance of gears is strongly influenced by resistance to temper softening of carburized steel. The investigation about the influence of chemical compositions on hardness after tempering revealed that silicon, chromium and molybdenum are effective elements to improve resistance to temper softening and pitting resistance. Considering the production of gears, molybdenum is unfavorable because it increases hardness of normalized or annealed condition. Developed new steel contains about 0.5 mass% of silicon and 2.7 mass% chromium. The new steel has excellent pitting resistance and wear resistance. Fatigue and impact strength are equivalent to conventional carburized steels. Cold-formability and machinability of the new steel are adequate for manufacturing gears because of its ordinary hardness before carburizing. The new steel has already been put to practical use in automatic transmission gears. Application test results are also reported.

The number of vehicles with engines using idling stop systems and hybrid systems to improve fuel consumption has recently been increasing. However, with such systems the frequent starts and stops of the engine, where the oil film between the bearings and shaft is squeezed out and direct contact between the components is more likely, can result in increased wear of the engine bearings, particularly in the main bearing. Bearings with resin overlays have been shown to display superior resistance to wear from such start-stop cycles. Moreover, cast iron shafts without quenching treatment have also been used in engines for cost reduction. Because the cast shaft has low hardness and unstable surface graphite after abrasive finishing, increase in the wear amount cannot be suppressed by conventional resin overlay in comparison with steel shaft. Therefore, the resin overlay with improved wear resistance achieved by adding hard particles was developed.

With increased awareness of environmental issues and regulations, developments for recent automotive engines are progressing towards engines with low fuel consumption. Due to these changes, automotive engine bearings are increasingly used in harsher environments, with higher loading and corresponding wear. From this background, resin overlays, where solid lubricant is dispersed in a resin binder, are being developed. Resin overlays show excellent sliding properties under boundary lubrication conditions, and are known to have superior wear and fatigue resistance compared with conventional aluminium based bearings. However, while conventional resin overlay bearings display excellent sliding properties, they tend to have inferior seizure resistance compared to Al-Sn-Si alloy bearings. In this study, by optimizing the strength of the resin overlay layer with addition of calcium carbonate particles, a resin overlay with equal wear resistance but improved seizure resistance was developed.

As the recent engines are designed for higher performance, piston pin bushing used for small end of connecting rod must endure higher dynamic load and oil temperature conditions. Therefore, the bushing is required higher wear resistance and anti-corrosion. And it is also expected to develop the bushing without lead due to environmental concerns. In this report, lead free copper based bushing alloy was studied. At first, in order to keep the anti-seizure property without lead, we studied the effects of hard particles added into copper based alloy. Second, we evaluated the effect of addition of hard particles on wear resistance and anti-corrosion.

Resin-based overlays as lead-free bearing materials for automobile engines are experimentally studied using tribology testing apparatus and an engine bench test rig. A resin overlay newly proposed is composed of Polybenzimidazole (PBI) as the base resin and solid lubricant Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) as an additive. PBI has high temperature performance and good adhesion and physical strength under higher temperatures. Consequently, a PBI-based overlay has good sliding properties in terms of wear resistance and fatigue resistance. The resin overlay shows applicability to automobile engine bearings which are used under high loads.

This paper describes the development of an inexpensive ceramic cam follower that uses a silicon nitride material and is more wear and scuff resistant than the sinter alloy cam follower. A thin ceramic disk is directly brazed on a steel cam follower body without using any stress-relief materials which makes the grinding for crowning unnecessary, reducing the production cost. We performed a material screening test using an abrasion tester to determine the optimum type of silicon nitride and the optimum surface roughness. Engine endurance tests proved its excellent wear and scuff resistance. Consequently, it has been adopted in the 1993 series production engines as the first ceramic cam follower.

The characteristics of a new diesel particulate filter material made of SiC were studied through engine tests in varying material properties, such as average pore diameter, and wall thickness. Compared to a conventional cordierite filter of the same size, particulate trapping efficiency is almost the same, and the pressure loss and the deterioration of fuel consumption can be reduced to about half with the optimum material properties. If the same pressure loss is allowed, the filter size can be reduced by 30%. Its good thermal conductivity prevents local temperature increases, which doubles the permissible amount of trapped particulates. As heat crack problems occurred in integral-type filters due to the high thermal expansion of SiC, a split-type filter having 49 filter segments with a square section was developed.

An analysis was made of wear factors by investigating the effect of engine operating conditions on valve train wear. It was found that cam nose wear increased as larger amounts of combustion products, including nitrogen oxides and unburned gasoline, became intermixed with the engine oil. Based on these results, a valve train wear test procedure has been developed for evaluating cam nose and rocker arm wear under engine firing conditions. It has been confirmed that this test procedure correlates will with ASTM Sequence VE test and CCMC TU-3 test.

A new high-performance and lightweight TiA1 intermetallic compound exhaust valve has been developed. The TiA1 valve can improve power output and fuel economy by contributing higher engine speeds and a reduction in valvetrain friction. It was achieved by developing a Ti-33.5A1-0.5Si-1Nb-0.5Cr (mass%) intermetallic compound, a precision casting method for TiA1 that provides a low-cost, high-quality process, and a plasma carburizing technique for assuring good wear resistance on the valve stem end, stem and face.

Recently, there has been a tendency of high power and high speed in automotive engines. In addition they have been also required high reliability. And engine bearings have been required to be advanced in wear resistance as well as seizure resistance. Therefore, copper-lead alloy bearings with overlay, which have better seizure resistance, have been widely used for high speed engines up to the present. But it becomes very important for them to advance the overlay wear resistance. In this paper, the composite overlay is mainly researched to improve wear resistance regarding kind of hard particles and their amounts in the overlay.

The advent of high-performance, compact, and lightweight engines in recent years brings forth a tendency to increase the load for engine bearings and demands on producing even higher levels of durability and reliability in bearing products against fatigue, seizure, wear, and corrosion. Based on the perspective of extending the bearing life, the authors have studied the problems that are encountered with the current three layer copper-lead alloy bearings after their overlay has worn out. Then, we studied the issues of lowered seizure resistance that results from the exposure of the nickel barrier, and of deficient corrosion resistance that results from the exposure of the bearing alloy. In order to improve upon these areas, we focused on diffusion phenomenon of overlay elements without the nickel barrier and also studied the feasibility of creating engine bearings whose alloy composition has been partially modified.

Various heat resistant alloys are being introduced for use in automobile emission equipment, such as thermal reactors and catalytic converters. For the past several years Japan has been developing alloys which emphasize oxidation resistance. Therefore, oxidation phenomena have been thoroughly researched and clarified. On the other hand, embrittlement, which is a marked deterioration similar to oxide deterioration, has not been studied sufficiently. The major subjects of investigation were the two forms of embrittlement in austenitic heat resistant alloys, caused by the precipitation of σ phase and the absorption of Nitrogen. Useful information was obtained from these results.

Basic vehicle performance, such as Safety, Comfort and Economy, are by dependent on tire performance, and it is the air pressure in the tire which assures this performance. However, tire air has a tendency to leak naturally, making it necessary to check them periodically. Since a deterioration in vehicle performance resulting from a drop on tire air pressure can not be directly felt by the driver, the number of people maintaining their tires sufficiently is relatively few. There have been many tire pressure warning devices developed which advise the driver when the pressure drops below a prescribed level. Differing from conventional devices, the TWD-III features a 7-step digital display (at a pitch of 0.1 kgf/cm2) which shows the pressure of each tire within an optional range, and it also has a flat tire warning function. The employment of echo effect from clystal vibrator resonance precludes the need to attach a power source on the tire.

Maintaining reliability of the connecting rod bearing is a very important subject, and the following is a problem that needs to be overcome. Predicting reliability has generally depended on minimum oil film thickness (M.O.F.T), but recently, the engines of passenger cars which have greater power and speed potential than conventional ones are sometimes run beyond their M.O.F.T. limit (a degree of roughness around the crank shaft's axis.) In such a case, it is so difficult to predict reliability according to M.O.F.T., that we need a new index which directly shows seizure and wear. For this purpose, we found that the crank shaft pin temperature can be a key cause of seizure and wear according to an analysis of the relationship between its temperature and the seizure and wear caused intentionally. Using this method, we confirmed that the combination of bearing and crank shaft materials is very important for preventing seizure and wear.