Copyright © 2012 Xiulan Wen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Variation elliptical piston skirt has better mechanical and thermodynamic properties and it is widely applied in internal combustion engine in recent years. Because of its complex form, its geometrical precision evaluation is a difficult problem. In this paper, quasi-particle swarm optimization (QPSO) is proposed to calculate the minimum zone error and ellipticity of cross-section linear profile, where initial positions and initial velocities of all particles are generated by using quasi-random Halton sequences which sample points have good distribution properties and the particles’ velocities are modified by constriction factor approach. Then, the design formula and mathematical model of the cross-section linear profile of variation elliptical piston skirt are set up and its objective function calculation approach using QPSO to solve the minimum zone cross-section linear profile error is developed which conforms to the ISO/1101 standard. Finally, the experimental results evaluated by QPSO, particle swarm optimization (PSO), improved genetic algorithm (IGA) and the least square method (LSM) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed QPSO and it improves the linear profile error evaluation accuracy and efficiency. This method can be extended to other complex curve form error evaluation such as cam curve profile.