The hardness of various types of soot produced by heavy‐ and light‐duty diesel engines of European, Japanese, and North American designs was measured by low‐loss electron energy‐loss spectroscopy (EELS). No clear general trend can be established that shows heavy‐duty diesel engine soot is necessarily harder than light‐duty diesel engine soot. The variation in hardness among individual soot particles produced by the same diesel engine can be as large as differences between the hardest soot particles produced by heavy‐duty diesel engines and the softest soot particles produced by light‐duty diesel engines. There are heavy‐duty diesel engines that can produce soot that is softer than that produced by some light‐duty diesel engines and vice versa. Nevertheless, the hardness of all types of soot studied is close to the range of hardness of metal engine parts. Thus, the results indicate that soot is hard enough to abrade some metal engine parts.
The increasing dependence on more robust additive chemistry to improve gear pitting resistance requires the additive technology development to rely less on a trial-and-error approach and more on a better basic understanding of the influence of additive chemistry on tribological contact layers' physical and chemical changes. The use of secondary neutral mass spectrometry (SNMS) and nanoindenter to analyse tribological contact layers had been carried out by Inacker and co-workers at NMI. They found that the alkyl structure of zinc dithiophosphate (ZDTP) and the type of cation have a profound effect on the thickness and nanohardness of the tribological layer. An extension to that study has been carried out in this investigation, which involves a design experiment of two variables (oil viscosity and surface roughness) while keeping the additive chemistry constant to determine their impact on the tribological layer. The methods used to analyse the tribological layers include SNMS, nanoindenter and SEM coupled with focused ion beam imaging of the rectangular well-shaped cross section. The results in general are in agreement with the findings of Inacker and his co-workers, namely greater micropitting reduces the thickness of the tribological layer and brings closer the depth of nanohardness maximum to the surface.
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