Numerical investigation of the cavitation damage in the wet cylinder liner of a high performance motorbike engine

In this paper a numerical methodology is proposed which aims at understanding the origin of a particular failure occurred in a two-cylinder high performance spark ignition engine for motorbike applications. A relevant cavitation damage/erosion has been detected at the water side of the engine cylinder liner during severe reliability bench tests, performed at the early stage of the engine design process. On the contrary, no damages have been registered during parallel high-load long runs of the motorbike. This contribution investigates in detail the differences between the bench test cooling circuit layout and the actual motorbike cooling circuit layout in order to find an explanation of the engine critical behaviour. In particular, CFD–CHT analyses of the water cooling jacket are performed, the computational domain covering both the coolant galleries and the surrounding metal components (head, block, gasket, valves, valve seats, valve guides, cylinder liner, spark plug). The contribution of a two-phase approach which takes into account the effect of a phase transition within the engine coolant is considered. Different engine operating conditions are investigated and a detailed analysis of different thermo-mechanical parameters influencing the engine behaviour is carried out. Results of the CFD simulations asses the methodology capability to correctly capture and understand the origin of the engine failure, thus providing a useful design tool for a faster and more effective design modification.