Hydrodynamic lubrication analysis of hydrophobic textured journal bearing considering cavitation

Abstract

Lubricated contact performance can be improved by using a textured surface as well as a hydrophobic surface. A procedure to obtain the optimal partially textured journal bearing combined with the hydrophobic coating is presented through the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. In this study, lubricated hydrophobic textured contacts with and without cavitation modeling are discussed. The cavitation phenomena in the lubricant is modeled using a multiphase model of “mixture” to obtain a realistic condition. The effect of dimple depth, as well as the eccentricity ratio, on the tribological performance, is of particular interest. It is found that the tribological performance is greatly influenced by the multiphase flow cavitation scheme. When cavitation modeling is taken into account, higher load support is noted. Furthermore, the simulation results show that a hydrophobic textured surface with a shallow depth (d/hmin<1) seems to be better for enhancing the tribological performance. Meanwhile, for the case of the low eccentricity ratio, there is an optimal dimple depth giving the highest load support. The findings explored in this work can be considered as a theoretical basis to increase the performance of hydrophobic textured journal bearing.

Keywords

• Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• friction
• hydrophobic textured surface
• load support
• multiphase cavitation