Micro-grooved hybrid spherical thrust bearing with Non-Newtonian lubricant behaviour

Abstract

Recent tribology research has primarily focused on leveraging engineered grooved surfaces to enhance the lubrication performance of tribo-contacts. The performance of fluid film bearings may be improved by using a properly designed micro-groove on the surface of bearing. This paper deals with the performance of micro-grooved hole-entry hybrid spherical thrust bearing (HSTB) considering Non-Newtonian behavior of the lubricant. To analyse the Non-Newtonian behaviour of lubricant the cubic law model has been used. The solution of the governing Reynold equation in the fluid film domain of the hole-entry hybrid spherical thrust bearing is obtained by the FEM. In this study, the influence of rectangular and circular shaped micro-groves has been analysed. The parametric analysis has also been performed to obtain the optimum attributes (i.e. w¯g,d¯g,l¯gr) of the micro-grooves for both the shapes. The present investigation shows that the performance of the hole-entry hybrid spherical thrust bearing gets enhanced by considering the micro-grooves on the surface of bearing. Furthermore, the bearings performance is affected by the geometry of the micro-groove used. The value of fluid film reaction (F¯y) and stiffness coefficient (S¯) is observed to be increased by 23.33% and 343.98% at εy = 0 and κ¯=1 for the case of rectangular-shaped micro-grooved hole-entry HSTB configuration.