Surface roughness effect on a magnetic fluid-based squeeze film between a curved porous circular plate and a flat circular plate

Abstract

Efforts have been made to investigate the magnetic fluid-based squeeze film behaviour between the curved rough porous circular plate and the flat rough porous circular plate. The curved film thickness is determined by an exponential function. A magnetic fluid is used as a lubricant in the presence of an external magnetic field oblique to the lower plate. The Reynolds Equation governing the film pressure is stochastically averaged with respect to the random roughness parameter and this equation is solved to obtain pressure distribution which results in the calculation of the load carrying capacity. The results establish that the performance of bearing system improves significantly as compared with that of a bearing system dealing with a conventional lubricant. Although the bearing suffers due to surface roughness, there exist ample scopes for obtaining a better performance in the case of negatively skewed roughness by suitably choosing the curvature parameter because the load carrying capacity increases sharply due to magnetization. In addition, this improved performance gets further enhanced due to negative variance, particularly when lower or moderate values of porosity parameter are involved. Besides, this investigation makes it clear that the bearing can support a load even when there is no flow.