Monitoring of Rotational Movements of Two Piston Rings in a Cylinder Using Radioisotopes

A radiotracer technique has been developed to monitor the rotational movement of two piston rings in one cylinder during engine operation. The rings were labeled with two different kinds of radioisotopes, i.e. Co and Ir, for identification of the top ring from the second ring. The radiotracers were implanted in a small hole bored on the inner side of each piston ring. The rings were installed in a single cylinder hydrogen engine and three Nal scintillation detectors were mounted around the engine block to measure the gamma radiation. The angle of ring-gap orientation was determined from the radiation counts measured with the three detectors during engine operation. Two windows (upper window for Co and lower window for Ir) were set on each ratemeter to count radiation from the two isotopes separately. Procedure to convert the radiation counts to the position of the ring gap was established. With the software programmed with MS-Visualbasic, radiation counts were compared with the reference responses that were measured at angular intervals of 10for each piston ring in advance of the experiment. The result was used for the evaluation of the relationship between the orientation of ring-gaps and oil consumption. It was found that an increase in the oil consumption rate of a specific operation condition was closely related to the relative phase angle of the two piston rings.