A new tribometer for piston ring friction measurements

The present paper contains a description of a new piston ring tribometer. The new piece of equipment allows instrumented tribological testing of piston ring and cylinder liner samples at temperatures, contact pressures, oscillating frequencies and lubrication conditions typical of diesel engines. The friction force is measured with a transducer that moves with the piston ring sample.The present paper includes as examples the results of initial tests with a compression ring segment against a cylinder liner specimen at a stroke amplitude of 40 mm, a temperature of 110°C and frequencies up to 20 Hz. The results show that the friction measurement principle with a moving friction force transducer is useful for friction measurements under reciprocating motion at high frequency. The results obtained were in good correlation with similar results found in literature, which encourages to further investigations with the piston ring tribometer