Numerical Study of Piston Skirt-Liner Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication and Contact by the Multigrid Method

The cylinder liner-piston system of internal combustion engines is one of the key friction pairs running at the most rigor working conditions. Under the influence of elastohydrodynamic lubrication and contact between the piston skirt and the liner, the dynamic process of piston is a nonlinear and stiff problem difficult to be analyzed accurately and easily. To reach a stable and rapid convergence in analysis, the MEBDF method and the multigrid method are used to solve the piston-skirt elastohydrodynamic lubrication and contact problem. Firstly the solving process of the piston dynamics is analyzed based on the MEBDF method. Then the residual equations for the elastohydrodynamic lubrication pressure are built based on the multigrid method. And the solving method of the nonlinear residual equations is presented based on the quasi Newton-Raphson method. Finally the numerical simulation program is developed based on the MEBDF method and the multigrid method. The elastohydrodynamic lubrication and contact problem of the piston skirt-liner system is simply analyzed based on the simulation. The study in this paper can provide an effective method for tribological analysis and optimization of piston–liner system in the future.