Investigation of Thermal Insulation Performance at Different Coating Thicknesses by Using Finite Volume Method

In this study, the effect of coating thickness and thermal property on the temperature distribution of an internal combustion diesel piston was investigated numerically. A piston was modeled in three-dimensional, and then a gird independency test was performed. The optimum element number was selected without losing computational accuracy. The thickness values were considered as 250, 500, and 750μ. Tungsten Carbide (WC) and Zirconia (ZrO2) were used as coating material. Convective heat loads were applied as boundary conditions. Temperature values in different locations were used to evaluate the thermal performance of the coating layer. The numerical results showed that WC doesn’t have a significant effect by the mean oh thermal insulation and WC-coated piston top surface temperature is similar to uncoated temperature even with the higher thickness values. However, ZrO2 has a better performance as thermal insulation material, and its effectiveness increases with higher thickness values.