Lubrication-film height imaging for hydrostatic bearings with fluorescence: With an analytic solution to the plane-parallel, fluorescent radiative transfer equation

The performance of hydrostatic bearings is in part decided by their lubrication-film height shape. Imaging the shape can be done by dissolving fluorescent dyes in the layer. However, current imaging techniques are rooted in heuristics, and as such, their physics, design parameters, and error sources are not quantitively understood. To fully...