Engine Lubrication System Analysis and Oil Pump Design Optimization

Abstract

The engine's lubrication system is crucial to engine's durability, NVH and performance etc. Modern engine lubrication system has both lubrication and hydraulic functions. For lubrication, it has to ensure the bearings, piston assembly, cam and tappet interfaces etc. to be all properly lubricated. For hydraulic, it has been used to actuate variable cam timing (VCT) units, cam profile switch (CPS) tappets and hydraulic lash adjusters (HLA) etc. These functional requirements determine the oil pump size and pressure setting, which in turn largely determine the power consumption of the oil pump. In this paper, an analytical approach was adopted to improve the pump performance using advanced 1D and 3D (computational fluid dynamics) simulation on both pump and lubrication circuit.