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Email a Friend	Article: Piston Rings
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Message:	I found this article at autospeed.com and thought you might be interested in reading it: 'Piston Rings' - Piston rings seal the bores against combustion pressures and prevent oil entering the combustion chambers. But how do they perform these functions? The most popular type of top rings used for passenger car engines over the last 30 or so years is invariably made from a high strength cast iron known as spheroidal graphite iron (ie SG iron for short). SG iron is very strong and ductile and is chosen because of its wear resistance and strength to resist breakage under the arduous environment of the top ring groove in a piston. The name 'spheroidal graphite' describes the way the graphite particles in the microstructure of this material are formed into spheres, as opposed to the plate or lamellar graphite flakes in normal cast iron. Because of this structure, the material resists cracking, whereas the flakes in normal cast iron act as stress concentrators which makes it very weak in bending or in tension. You can read the article at: http://www.autospeed.com/A_108913/cms/article.html