Floating ring bearings are the commonly used type of bearing for automotive turbochargers. The automotive industry continuously investigates how to reduce the bearing friction losses and how to create silent turbochargers. Many of these studies involve creating a numerical model of the rotor-bearing system and performing validation on a test bench on which a turbocharger is driven by hot gases. This approach, however, involves many uncertainties which diminish the validity of the measurement results. In this study, we present a test setup in which these uncertainties are minimized. The measurement results show the behavior of the floating ring bearing as a function of oil feed pressure, oil feed temperature, rotor unbalance and bearing clearances. Next to an increased validity, the test setup provides measurement data with good repeatability and can therefore represent a case study which can be used for validation of rotor-bearing models

Journal bearings are used to support rotors in a wide range of applications. In order to ensure reliable operation, accurate analyses of these rotor-bearing systems are crucial. Coupled analysis of the rotor and the journal bearing is essential in the case that the rotor is flexible. The accuracy of prediction of the model at hand depends on its comprehensiveness. In this study, we construct three bearing models of increasing modeling comprehensiveness and use these to predict the response of two different rotor-bearing systems. The main goal is to evaluate the correlation with measurement data as a function of modeling comprehensiveness: 1D versus 2D pressure prediction, distributed versus lumped thermal model, Newtonian versus non-Newtonian fluid description and non-mass-conservative versus mass-conservative cavitation description. We conclude that all three models predict the existence of critical speeds and whirl for both rotor-bearing systems. However, the two more comprehensive models in general show better correlation with measurement data in terms of frequency and amplitude. Furthermore, we conclude that a thermal network model comprising temperature predictions of the bearing surroundings is essential to obtain accurate predictions. The results of this study aid in developing accurate and computationally-efficient models of flexible rotors supported by plain journal bearings.