USE OF CFD 3D ANALYSIS RESULTS FOR ROBUST THERMAL MODEL OF PISTON CROWN

In recent years the OEM’s trend is to develop, especially for Diesel engines, smaller engines with higher specific power outputs to comply with both even more stringent emission requirements and vehicle performance. This leads to higher mechanical and thermal load on all engine components, so it is of fundamental importance to analyze these loads. This thesis work, developed at Punch Torino S.p.a., is focused on the steady-state thermal analysis for Diesel engine pistons, that is the first step of the whole piston design validation process. In particular, the aim was to use results coming from CFD3D analysis as thermal boundary conditions for the FEM simulation to obtain more realistic temperature distributions. To do that the workflow was structured in this way: first was done a deep literature investigation aimed to achieve a greater understanding of the process; after that was analyzed the current procedure used in the company to highlight its strong and weak points and doing in parallel many cross-functionality meeting to examine the robustness of input data. At the end of these steps, considering all acquired information was proposed, a new procedure. For the validation of the new procedure, two different pistons were analyzed, following the actual and the new procedure workflow, to compare and show the main differences between the two and all the possible advantages coming from the new one.