Abstract
Rough and textured surfaces are of paramount importance for lubrication, both in nature and in technology. While surface roughness relevantly influences both friction and wear, artificial surface texturing improves the performance of slider bearings as an energy efficiency action. The simulation of hydrodynamic lubrication by taking into account complex surfaces as boundaries requires the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software able to predict the pressure and the velocity profile through the thickness of the fluid and at any point within the 3D domain. In the present study, a CFD–smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code is applied to simulate hydrodynamic lubrication for a linear slider bearing in the presence of a 3D rough surface, showing the capabilities of CFD–SPH in modelling such complex interaction phenomena. Numerical assessments involve the load capacity, the 3D fields of the velocity vector, and the pressure 3D field (both within the fluid domain and at the fluid–plate interface).
Highlights
Hydrodynamic lubrication is the lubrication regime featured by a fluid film continuously interposed between interacting rigid solid surfaces and it represents a simplification of the elasto-hydrodynamic lubrication, in case deformation of the surface is negligible
Hereafter follows a brief introduction to numerical modelling of bearings for hydrodynamic lubrication
There is a class of flow condition known as slow viscous motion in which the pressure and viscous terms prevail over the others, which leads to the Reynolds equations for hydrodynamic lubrication
Summary
Hydrodynamic lubrication is the lubrication regime featured by a fluid film continuously interposed between interacting rigid solid surfaces and it represents a simplification of the elasto-hydrodynamic lubrication, in case deformation of the surface (elasticity effects) is negligible. Almqvist et al [6] provided inter-comparisons between a FD model based on Reynolds’ equation for fluid films and a commercial CFD-FVM code based on Navier–Stokes equations. Yildiran et al [20] presented a 2D CFD-boundary element method (BEM) model for hydrodynamic lubrication, including the representation of re-entrant textures They highlighted the effects of roughness in inducing the so-called Stokes microscopic regime of lubrication. With respect to the state-of-the-art on CFD modelling for bearings, mostly based on 2D codes or Reynolds’ simplified equation, the present study uses a 3D CFD code with all the terms of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible fluids with uniform viscosity It provides validations on local quantities (pressure and velocity profiles) and it is able to simulate complex 3D surfaces. The SPH formulation, whose mathematical and numerical formulations have been thoroughly described in [35] and validated in relation to benchmark fundamental solutions for hydrodynamic lubrication (uniform slider and a linear slider over flat-surface configurations), is applied to the simulation of the hydrodynamic lubrication regime for a linear slider bearing on a
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