Modern combustion engines face increasing ecological, economical and customer requirements. Due to shorter product development times and the necessity to know component temperatures before prototypes are built, their measurement is not sufficient anymore. Their simulation increasingly gains in importance. This work is about the simulation of basic engine components using the finite element software package ABAQUS. Object of investigation was a 4-cylinder-DI-diesel engine with aluminium engine block. The aim was to identify the decisive parameters for the temperature field formation und to gain more knowledge about these. With an existing simulation model the passage of the heat flux through the engine was studied. The analysis followed the heat flux starting from the fuel combustion, passing through various components and ending in the cooling jacket. The thermal contact conductances (TCC) of the heat transfer between the components came up as a significant parameter. Especially for the TCC of the heat transfer between cylinder liner and the engine block an equivalent value for pure thermal simulations was derived using fully coupled thermo-mechanical calculations. Further a heat flux analysis brought up that the heat flux in the piston generated by the combustion has a significant influence on the component temperatures of the cylinder liner and the engine block. To characterize this influence a method, able to simulate temperature fields of moving components, was introduced using ABAQUS/Explicit. To validate the simulation model improvements, a method was developed to directly measure cylinder liner temperatures along with engine block temperatures.