Thermohydrodynamic Modeling of a Tapered-Land Thrust Bearing
Prediction of the performance of tapered-land bearings is important.
Thermohydrodynamic Modeling of a Tapered-Land Thrust Bearing with Validation Against Experimental Data
Introduction
Tapered-land thrust bearings are mostly utilized in oil lubricated rotating machinery such as turbines, pumps and turbochargers. Prediction of the performance of tapered-land bearings is important to assess the operating limits based on the minimum film thickness and maximum pad temperature as well as evaluating power loss and oil flow requirements.
This study was selected as the benchmark case studied numerically in this work since detailed bearing performance characteristics were provided such as pad temperature, pressure, minimum film thickness and torque.
In this work, a computational fluid-film bearing analysis model has been utilized in order to investigate the conjugate heat transfer problem for a tapered-land bearing using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis.
The results obtained here yielded that a thermohydrodynamic (THD) model that includes the energy transfer into the structures surrounding the fluid film is sufficient enough to predict the performance of a tapered-land bearing at a wide speed and load range in the case where the runner is thick enough that the effect of deformations on the results can be ignored.
