Abstract
This research presents the effect of the thermal boundary condition on the tilting pad journal bearing characteristics. The thermal boundary condition includes the temperature around the bearing pad, spinning journal, and lubricant supply temperature. Change in bearing performance according to the temperature around each element constituting the bearing was analyzed without paying attention to how the actual thermal boundary conditions around the bearing are configured. High fidelity numerical model of tilting pad journal bearing is presented for (1) the analysis of heat generation in the thin film, (2) heat transfer in the lubricant, (3) heat flux flowing into the journal and pad, (4) temperature change in the journal and bearing, (5) the resultant thermal deformation, (6) change in the lubricant film thickness arising from the thermal deformation of journal and bearing pads, and (7) the resulting change in the heat generation in the thin film. To reach the steady state of the bearing–journal system, the Runge–Kutta scheme with adaptive time step is adopted where the dynamic and thermal system are solved simultaneously in multi-physics model. Performance change of the bearing according to three changes: (a) boundary temperature around shaft, (b) boundary temperature around bearing pads, and (c) lubricant supply temperature were investigated.
Highlights
The performance and temperature prediction of bearings supporting the load of rotating machinery is one of the important analysis requirements from the viewpoint of verifying the operational reliability of turbomachinery
The purpose of this study is to investigate the change in bearing performance according to (a) journal boundary temperature, (b) bearing boundary temperature, and (c) lubricant supply temperature
If the design variable or operating condition other than the rotor spin speed is changed, similar performance changes can be predicted according to the change of the Recently, commercial software has been used to analyze complex phenomena in bearings, but for this, a huge amount of time and cost is required, such as there is for using a supercomputer
Summary
The performance and temperature prediction of bearings supporting the load of rotating machinery is one of the important analysis requirements from the viewpoint of verifying the operational reliability of turbomachinery. Various studies have been attempted to predict the temperature of the bearing system based on the high-performance computers and commercial software. There have been many researches to predict the bearing performance with numerical approaches. Knight and Niewiarowski [1] presented a journal bearing model for the analysis of the fluid film thermal characteristics in the cavitated region. Taniguchi et al [2] presented a three-dimensional (3D) thermo-hydrodynamic (THD) lubrication model of tilting pad journal bearing (TPJB) for the steam turbine. Kim et al [4] presented a finite-element (FE)-model-based two-dimensional (2D) TPJB model with a thermo-elasto-hydrodynamic (TEHD) lubrication model
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