A thrust bearing consisting of an infinitely wide pad, subject to a constant load and sliding at constant speed on a runner with transverse sinusoidal textures is considered. The analysis method consists of time- and mesh-resolved simulations with a finite volume approximation of the Elrod–Adams model. Friction and clearance contours as functions of the texture depth and wavelength are built by performing more than 10,000 simulations. Conclusions are drawn for bearings of low, moderate and high conformity, unveiling basic mechanisms of friction reduction and global quantitative trends that are useful for texture selection.
The coupling of Reynolds and Rayleigh-Plesset equations has been used in several works to simulate lubricated devices considering cavitation. The numerical strategies proposed so far are variants of a staggered strategy where Reynolds equation is solved considering the bubble dynamics frozen, and then the Rayleigh-Plesset equation is solved to update the bubble radius with the pressure frozen. We show that this strategy has severe stability issues and a stable methodology is proposed. The proposed methodology performance is assessed on two physical settings. The first one concerns the propagation of a decompression wave along a fracture considering the presence of cavitation nuclei. The second one is a typical journal bearing, in which the coupled model is compared with the Elrod-Adams model.
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