The lubrication system of an internal combustion engine serves many purposes. It lubricates moving parts, cools the engine, removes impurities, supports loads, and minimizes friction. The entrapment of air in the lubricating oil is called oil aeration. Oil aeration can be detrimental to internal combustion (IC) engines. This study attempts to determine a means to reduce the level of aeration in...

We review some of the key tribological issues of relevance to motorsport applications. Tribology is the science of friction and wear, and in a high performance engine, friction and wear are controlled by good component design (e.g. the engine and the transmission) and also by the use of high performance lubricants with the correct physical (and chemical) properties, matched to the machine they ...

Thin fluid films can have surprising behavior depending on the boundary conditions enforced, the energy input and the specific Reynolds number of the fluid motion. Here we study the equations of motion for a thin fluid film with a free boundary and its other interface in contact with a solid wall. Although shear dissipation increases for thinner layers and the motion can generally be described ...

A generalized form of Reynolds equation for fluid lubrication has been derived considering the effects of viscosity variation in the film and slip at the bearing surfaces. Various specific cases have been deduced and the concept of multiple-layer lubrication introduced. The higher lubricant viscosity near the bearing surface is beneficial in reducing the coefficient of friction but the effect o...

Wear debris in lubrication oil provides important information for marine engine condition monitoring and faults diagnosis. Inductive sensors have been widely used to detect wear oil. To improve the sensitivity, inductive coil is always connected with a capacitor parallel form LC resonance-sensing circuit. A previous study optimized resonance circuit by adjusting excitation frequency. However, m...

It is proposed to use elastomeric composites as artificial joint bearing surfaces to increase their fluid film lubrication and therefore reduce the number of failures which have been attributed to wear mechanisms related to frictional forces. The fluid generated between the surfaces supports part of the load and prevents direct contact of the bearing surfaces. In order to obtain optimum elastoh...

BACKGROUND Following various types of naturally-occurring traumatic injury to an articular joint, the lubricating ability of synovial fluid is impaired, with a correlated alteration in the concentration and/or structure of lubricant molecules, hyaluronan and proteoglycan-4. However, the effect of arthroscopic cartilage repair surgery on synovial fluid lubricant function and composition is unkno...

We propose a simple model, supported by contact-dynamics simulations as well as rheology and friction measurements, that links the transition from continuous to discontinuous shear-thickening in dense granular pastes to distinct lubrication regimes in the particle contacts. We identify a local Sommerfeld number that determines the transition from Newtonian to shear-thickening flows, and then sh...

We propose a simple model, supported by contact-dynamics simulations as well as rheology and friction measurements, that links the transition from continuous to discontinuous shear thickening in dense granular pastes to distinct lubrication regimes in the particle contacts. We identify a local Sommerfeld number that determines the transition from Newtonian to shear-thickening flows, and then sh...