Abstract
One of the major prerequisites for an improved combination of cylinder liner material and piston ring material is a good description of the materials tribological performance. Piston rings operate in three different lubrication regimes and the materials should be characterised for all of them before a final selection is made. A new approach to study the cylinder liner and piston rings (primary drive line in the combustion chamber) is used to characterise five different cylinder liner materials. The utilised test apparatus is working after the block-on-ring principle where the cylinder liner is made into a ring and the piston ring into a block. A short introduction of the test apparatus and its abilities is presented and discussed. Results from comparison and characterisation of five different cylinder liner materials run with a fixed piston ring material are presented. A preliminary ranking of the materials is given based on the materials tribological performance. The materials are evaluated on basis of friction force, oil film thickness variation, temperature variation and rotational speed.