Diesel engine piston

#The invention relates to a piston for a diesel engine in accordance with the preamble of claim 1.

#It is known from the SAE Paper 860888 “In-Service Performance of Ceramic and Metallic Coatings in Diesel Engines” that corrosion can be prevented in diesel pistons by means of coating the piston crown with MCrAlY plasma spray coatings. However, the results presented there are purely research results and have not found any use in practice up to the present, and the spray layers indicated for corrosion protection have always been considered in combination with layers of zirconium dioxide, for which they act as an adhesion layer and a corrosion protection layer. No detailed information about the implementation of the layer is provided in the SAE paper.

#The invention therefore deals with the problem of making such spray layers usable for series production, also with regard to economically efficient production.

#The invention will be explained in greater detail below, on the basis of an exemplary embodiment. The drawing shows:

#FIG. 1 the piston crown of a piston according to the invention.

#The piston crown 1, which is made of steel, has a combustion cavity 2 and a surface 3 that faces the cylinder head. A plasma spray layer 4 that covers the surface 3 and the combustion cavity 2, at least in part, has its greatest thickness in the region of the cavity edge 5, and the layer thickness decreases radially towards the outside and towards the cavity bottom. In this connection, the spray layer is not shown to scale, but rather enlarged to make the progression of the layer thickness clear.