A unified treatment of thick and thin film elastohydrodynamic problems by using higher order element methods

Abstract

A unified mathematical treatment of thick and thin film elastohydrodynamic lubrication problems is presented. The construction of approximate solutions is discussed by using Ritz-Galerkin methods with piecewise polynomial basis functions. In particular for the line contact problem, smooth Hermite and cubic spline spaces are used to obtain solutions over a wide load-speed range. Pressure ‘spikes’ are obtained.