Universal journal bearing test rig uncertainty and validation measurement to enhance marine shafting performance

Abstract

Enhancing the ship power transmission is surely a target sought by all those involved in the marine applications, mainly due to its beneficial results regarding making tangible reduction in fuel oil consumption, consequently considerable reduction in emissions to environment. The oil film lubrication within journal bearings is certainly a key factor in attaining that goal. Besides, journal bearings being essentially intrinsic structures by which numerous experimental tests could successfully be carried out. The first vital step in the uninterrupted series of the research efforts at hand has been to design and construct a journal bearing test rig (JBTR) characterized by sufficient validity for embracing all aspired experiments. Additionally, following the construction of the test rig, there emerged the need to realize the second step which mainly focused on enhancing and promoting the range and capabilities of the journal bearing, which ultimately turned it into a universal journal bearing test rig (UJBTR). Such step has granted the structure the ability to embrace even more sophisticated and much wider range of experiments. Further, one of the main consequences resulting from conducting versatile experiments and tests are the inevitable errors, or rather more precisely the uncertainties. Conducting such essential tests would entail making measurements, which in turn would incur necessary uncertainties. Consequently, there arose the need to introduce the current paper presenting a thorough investigation relating to the uncertainty measurement with view to better identifying the nature of such errors, with view to keeping them to a minimum and trying to overcome their hazardous consequences in as far as the experimentation procedures and outcomes are related.