A Two-Scale Approach for Lubricated Soft-Contact Modeling: An Application to Lip-Seal Geometry

Abstract

We consider the case of soft contacts in mixed lubrication conditions. We develop a novel, two scales contact algorithm in which the fluid- and asperity-asperity interactions are modeled within a deterministic or statistic scheme depending on the length scale at which those interactions are observed. In particular, the effects of large-scale roughness are deterministically calculated, whereas those of small-scale roughness are included by solving the corresponding homogenized problem. The contact scheme is then applied to the modeling of dynamic seals. The main advantage of the approach is the tunable compromise between the high-computing demanding characteristics of deterministic calculations and the much lower computing requirements of the homogenized solutions.