CFD-Based Thermohydrodynamic Analysis of Rayleigh Step Bearings Considering an Inertia Effect

Abstract

In this article, a numerical study investigating the thermohydrodynamic (THD) characteristics of Rayleigh step bearings running under steady, incompressible, and laminar conditions is presented. An attempt is also made to investigate the THD behaviours of step bearings when they are running under different speeds, geometrical factors, and Reynolds numbers. To reach this goal, the conservations of mass, momentum, and energy equations are solved simultaneously by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. Discretized forms of these equations are obtained by the finite volume method and solved using the SIMPLE algorithm. By this numerical method, the velocity, pressure, and temperature distributions in the lubricant flow are calculated. In this work, the set of governing equations are also solved with inertia terms and without these terms in order to investigate the effect of inertia. Also, an attempt is made to investigate the effects of runner surface velocity and bearing geometrical factors on the lubricant pressure and temperature distributions and also on two important bearing parameters, the load capacity and friction force. A comparison between the numerical results with theoretical findings in the open literature shows good consistency.