A comparison of methods of modelling the bearing surfaces in an internal combustion engine

Abstract

An existing model for the dynamic analysis of the piston motion in an internal combustion engine has been modified to incorporate a simpler representation of the piston–cylinder interaction, and to represent the main and big-end bearings as lubricated rather than dry journal bearings. The results demonstrate that the differences in calculated bearing forces and output torques are negligible, indicating that the simple dry journal bearing model is sufficient, but show that the modelling of the interaction between piston and cylinder is considerably improved.