Surface roughness effect on thermohydrodynamic analysis of journal bearings lubricated with couple stress fluids

Abstract

The paper presents, surface roughness effect for thermo-hydrodynamic analysis of journal bearings extended to couple stress lubricants with high polymer additives. A modified energy equation is simultaneously solved with heat transfer equation as well as modified Reynolds equation by using Multigrid method. The effects of couple stress and surface roughness on the performances of a finite journal bearing are presented in detail. Further, it is shown that lubricants with couple stress and surface roughness, not only increases the load capacity and decreases the friction coefficient, but also generates a lower bearing temperature field. Thus, the lubricant with couple stress improves the performance of journal bearings. The characteristics of bearing are compared with numerical results.