Disintegration of Oil Films Emerging From Radial Holes in a Rotating Cylinder

Abstract

A fundamental study has been performed to examine the disintegration of oil films emerging from radial holes in a rotating hollow cylinder. The configuration investigated is an abstraction of one of the droplet generation sources in an aero-engine bearing compartment; similar configurations may also occur inside gearboxes. The paper aims to contribute to both the determination of directly applicable droplet characteristics and the establishment of a data-base that can be used for the development of droplet generation models. Similar to a prior paper on droplet generation processes at the rim of a rotating disk (Glahn et al, 2000), the near-term objectives of the study are (i) to determine droplet sizes under relevant aero-engine bearing compartment operating conditions, and (ii) to measure individual droplet diameter/velocity relationships. The long-term objective is to incorporate this information into advanced CFD-based design tools. Therefore, special emphasis has been directed towards a correlation of test results that enables determination of boundary conditions for a two-phase (oil droplets/air) simulation of lubrication system components. Based on the results of the present paper, droplet flow boundary conditions in terms of mean diameter, standard deviation of the diameter distribution, starting velocity, and flow angle are available for oil droplets generated by disintegration of oil films emerging from rotating radial holes and rotating disks.