Complementing 3D Roughness Parameters for Monitoring of Improved Honing of Cylinder Bores

Paper in proceeding, 2008

It is of common interest to reduce the oil consumption and frictional losses in the internal combustion engines which are in a great deal influenced by the quality of the cylinder liner surface. Its criss-cross patterned topography consists of a communicating system of grooves of different density, width, and depth, somewhere covered by folded metal, and somewhere totally interrupted and unbalanced as a result of the honing process imperfections. These features are crucial for a good liner’s function and are inspected from scanning electron microscope images by experts, which is subjective and time consuming process. Today, a fast automatic quality control is possible by using optical instruments to measure the liner’s topography, and a computer to calculate and check if the standard roughness and groove parameters are in tolerance. Therefore, combining the profile and image analysis, algorithms were developed to compute liner’s groove parameters from 3D interference measurements taken from three different types of cylinder bore surfaces of passenger cars. One of the surface types was a result of a test of an improved honing and the other two being currently in use. Then, the standard and new parameters (groove interruption, number of grooves, holes, etc) were incorporated in a characterisation tool to objectively and quickly evaluate the improvement of the liner’s quality for an updated monitoring in production.