Thermal Analysis of Turbocharger Steel Gasket via Experimental Test

Increasing the power (torque) of nowadays engines, along with reduction of fuel consumption and dimensions of them, cause to the use of turbocharged systems. Since turbo chargers are exposed to the exhaust hot gases and have a high operating speed, it is necessary to utilize high technology design and special materials with high cost. The temperature of the exhaust system with gasoline fuel sometimes reaches 950 degrees Celsius, and the change of operating points causes to its thermal fatigue. Hence, the thermal evaluation is one of the basic design activity for manufacturing and testing of turbo charger and its related parts, such as the turbo gasket. In this paper, a new method for evaluating the temperature of a gasket of a four-cylinder gasoline engine is presented. In this method, the temperature of the closest points to gasket is measured at the turbo housing and the exhaust manifold flange, and finally the temperature of the gasket is estimated using them. The results show that in this study, the maximum temperature of the gaskets is about 807 degrees Celsius, which is consistent with the results of analyzes and other turbo charger temperature measurements. Since the access to turbo charger gasket and direct measurements of its temperature is difficult or impossible, the proposed method can be useful in evaluating the temperature of the turbo charger gasket. Then, the measured temperature in the test of durability of thermal-mechanical fatigue was used and the obtained result was evaluated. The failure of gasket in this type of test could indicate the accuracy of the temperature.