Abstract
This work aims to evaluate wear severity of an internal combustion engine by examining wear particles retained by oil filter disassembled from the engine. The photomicrographs of wear particles, illustrated in this work, provide specific information about the severity of wear. The visual inspection of those particles by microscope can describe the wear mechanism which generates those particles, detect the transfer from one wear mechanism to the other and identify the abnormality of wear.
Through following the temper colours of the tested wear particles the temperatures of the moving surfaces reached a value of 540 °C, during the generation of those particles, which indicates the wear severity and confirms the critical influence of both the lubricant and surface materials.