New Ceramic Thermal Barrier Coatings Development in a Spark-Ignition Engine – Experimental Investigation

In the trend of thermal efficiency of an internal combustion engine improvement, it is important to reduce cooling losses especially the gas to combustion wall. Previous studies in 1990’s tried to develop adiabatic engine. The use of high insulation material (i.e.: ceramic) leads to reduction of the combustion and the volumetric efficiencies. In the 2010’s, several authors introduced the concept of Thermo-Swing. This innovative solution is based on high combustion chamber wall temperature during combustion to reduce the convective gas-to-wall heat flux, and low wall temperature during intake to reduce wall-to-gas heat flux. One of the technical solutions to implement the concept is the introduction of ceramic coating on the wall of the combustion chamber. Authors who studied this concept published also possible properties for the coating. This paper presents the coating material and structure optimization to get the best tradeoff for the thermo-swing approach in the first part. Then, the coating performances results measured on engine test bench using most recent technique are presented. Before the conclusion, the results will be discussed.