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Engine manufacturers are increasingly concerned about oil consumption due to its implications for operating costs, emissions, and durability in both diesel and natural gas-powered engines. As future engines aim for low or near-zero emissions while utilizing low/zero carbon fuels, lubricant oil consumption will play a critical role in achieving decarbonization and emissions targets. Hydrogen-fuelled engines, in particular, will be more vulnerable to oil droplet and oil ash-based pre-ignition. Traditionally, the influence of key design parameters on oil consumption has been determined during the validation phase of an engine development program, which entails extensive testbed hours and time-consuming hardware iterations. As a result, development programs may be unable to optimize oil consumption due to cost and time constraints.

In order to align with net-zero CO2 ambitions, automotive OEMs have been developing increasingly sophisticated strategies to minimise the impact that combustion engines have on the environment. Intelligent thermal management systems to actively control coolant flow around the engine have a positive impact on friction generated in the power cylinder by improving the warmup rate of cylinder liners and heads. This increase in temperature results in an improved frictional performance and cycle averaged fuel consumption, but also increases the piston to liner clearances due to rapid warm up of the upper part of the cylinder head. These increased clearances can introduce piston slap noise and substantially degrade the NVH quality to unacceptable levels, particularly during warmup after soak at low ambient temperatures. Using analytical techniques, it is possible to model the thermo-structural and NVH response of the power cylinder with different warm up strategies.

Requirements for reducing powertrain NVH drives the selection of low piston skirt to liner clearances contradicting the requirement to maintain larger skirt clearances for minimizing engine friction. Whilst this clearance trade-off between low friction and low NVH is fundamental, piston design features have a significant effect on where the trade-off curve sits on the friction/NVH map. Design features can therefore be viewed not by either friction or NVH improvement measures but a shift in the friction-NVH trade off curve. Specifically, some piston design features which may be targeted at reducing friction can be viewed as either a friction benefit for similar NVH or an NVH improvement for similar friction levels. The ability to realistically quantify the effect of the design changes on NVH is therefore critical to determining what design changes to recommend, the direction of the piston design being highly sensitive to the process by which the impact on NVH is assessed.