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This paper presents a numerical study of the effects of inlet supply starvation on film thickness in EHL point contacts. Generally this problem is treated using the position of the inlet meniscus as the governing parameter; however, it is difficult to measure this in real applications. Thus, in this paper an alternative approach is adopted whereby the amount of oil present on the surfaces is used to define the degree of starvation. It is this property which determines both meniscus position and film thickness reduction. The effect of subsequent overrollings on film thickness decay can also be evaluated. In the simplest case a constant lubricant inlet film thickness in the Y direction is assumed and the film thickness distribution is computed as a function of the oil available. This yields an equation predicting the film thickness reduction, with respect to the fully flooded value, from the amount of lubricant initially available on the surface, as a function of the number of overrollings n. However, the constant inlet film thickness does not give a realistic description of starvation for all conditions. Some experimental studies show that the combination of side flow and replenishment action can generate large differences in local oil supply and that the side reservoirs play an important role in this replenishment mechanism. Thus the contact centre can be fully starved whilst the contact sides remain well lubricated. In these cases, a complete analysis with a realistic inlet distribution has been carried out and the numerical results agree well with experimental findings.

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This work examines 140 hydrological studies conducted in the Mediterranean region. It identifies key characteristics of the hydrological responses of Mediterranean catchments at various time scales and compares different methods and modelling approaches used for individual-catchment studies. The study area is divided into the northwestern (NWM), eastern (EM) and southern (SM) Mediterranean. The analysis indicates regional discrepancies in which the NWM shows the most extreme rainfall regime. A tendency for reduced water resources driven by both anthropogenic and climatic pressures and a more extreme rainfall regime are also noticeable. Catchments show very heterogeneous responses over time and space, resulting in limitations in hydrological modelling and large uncertainties in predictions. However, few models have been developed to address these issues. Additional studies are necessary to improve the knowledge of Mediterranean hydrological features and to account for regional specificities.ARTICLE HISTORY

This article traces the contribution of the Dowson and Higginson work to numerical line contact elasto-hydrodynamic lubricated film thickness prediction and the Hamrock and Dowson contribution to the film thickness prediction in elliptical contacts. Considering the line contact work, this article shows that both the numerical pressure and film thickness results and the curve-fitted film thickness predictions are very accurate, even by today's standards. Concerning the elliptical results, the authors show that the original predictions remain surprisingly accurate but that the issue of the minimum to central film thicknesss ration Hm/ Hc is not yet completely settled. The article then continues to discuss some limitations of the current models that require additional work, mainly in the area of realistic non-Newtonian lubricant rheology for film thickness predictions and pressure spike analysis.

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The study of runoff is a crucial issue because it is closely related to flooding, water quality and erosion. In cultivated catchments, agricultural ditch drainage networks are known to influence runoff. As anthropogenic elements, agricultural ditch drainage networks can therefore be altered to better manage surface runoff in cultivated catchments. However, the relationship between the spatial configuration, i.e., the density and the topology, of agricultural ditch drainage networks and surface runoff in cultivated catchments is not understood. We studied this relationship by using a random network simulator that was coupled to a distributed hydrological model. The simulations explored a large variety of spatial configurations corresponding to a thousand stochastic agricultural ditch drainage networks on a 6.4 km2 Mediterranean cultivated catchment. Next, several distributed hydrological functions were used to compute water flow-paths and runoff for each simulation. The results showed that (i) denser networks increased the drained volume and the peak discharge and decreased hillslopes runoff, (ii) greater network density did not affect the surface runoff any further above a given network density, (iii) the correlation between network density and runoff was weaker for small subcatchments (< 2 km2) where the variability in the drained area that resulted from changes in agricultural ditch drainage networks increased the variability of runoff and (iv) the actual agricultural ditch drainage network appeared to be well optimized for managing runoff as compared with the simulated networks. Finally, our results highlighted the role of agricultural ditch drainage networks in intercepting and decreasing overland flow on hillslopes and increasing runoff in drainage networks

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