Discontinuous grooves in thrust air bearings designed with CAPSO algorithm

Abstract

Spiral groove thrust air bearings suffer from low load capacity. Although there have been studies on optimizing the groove geometry of spiral groove thrust air bearings to enhance the load capacity, all of them found so far have focused on continuous grooves only. Here, a novel groove optimization method, which allows the flexibility of generating either continuous or discontinuous grooves, is introduced for maximizing the load capacity of spiral groove thrust air bearings. In the proposed method, computational fluid dynamics is combined with the chaos-enhanced accelerated particle swarm optimization algorithm to search for the optimal groove geometry. A case study is given where the optimization of an initial spiral groove thrust air bearing is implemented. The optimized grooves are found to be discontinuous and of new geometry. Numerical analysis shows that the optimized discontinuous grooves can achieve higher load capacity than the optimized continuous grooves, the conventional herringbone, and the initial spiral grooves. The effect of the proposed method is further verified in experiments.