Thermo mechanical analysis of a ceramic coated piston used in a diesel engine

The aim of this paper is to determine temperature and stress distributions in a ceramic based on Partially Stabilized Zirconia coated steel piston crown by using plasma spraying for improving performance of a marine diesel engine. Effects of coating constituent and thickness on temperature and stress distributions were investigated including comparisons with results from an uncoated piston by means of finite element method namely ANSYS. Temperature developed at the coated surface is significantly higher than that of the uncoated piston. The maximum stress components occur between bond coat and adjacent ceramic layer. Provided that coating thickness is constant as 0.5 mm, when numbers of layers increase, magnitude of the normal stress decrease about 34.1% on the base metal surface according to uncoated piston, but the base metal surface temperature of the steel piston increase about 13.1%.