Abstract
The rate of wear of cam followers in a valve train system is mainly a function of contact stress between the cam and the follower, sliding velocity and hydrodynamic film thickness between the two mating surfaces. The wear or surface fatigue can be reduced by maximizing the elastohydrodynamic film thickness. In this paper, an attempt has been made to estimate the optimal specific film thickness of cam-follower system quantitatively. A general TES polynomial function with real values of exponents is developed and genetic algorithm (GA) is used as optimization techniques for maximizing the minimum specific film thickness. The optimization programs enumerate values of the exponents for synthesis of cam displacement curves. The results show that the minimum film thickness can be increased considerably, e.g. approximately 7% in this paper.
