Load-based pressure profile matching for highly deformable fluid film bearings
Dave D. Sonneveld (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
Ron A.J. van Ostayen (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
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Abstract
Standard fluid film bearings are rigid and designed to operate with fixed surface geometries and curvatures. Introducing compliance in these bearings may extend their application range by allowing the bearing to adapt to wavy counter surfaces with a non-uniform curvature. As a result of this compliance, however, the film pressure might influence the bearing deformation. Despite existing solutions that have been proposed in literature, it remains a challenge to maintain a near-constant and efficient film profile under varying loads on functionally wavy surfaces. This work therefore presents a new design approach with a load-distributing support, based on the principle of pressure profile matching, to better control the deformability in these bearings. The fundamental working principle of this approach is shown and analyzed in a hydrostatic bearing. For this, an elasto-hydrostatic lubrication model is presented that combines the essential fluid-film and elastic behavior. The results show that, even with a limited number of distributed support forces, the approach maintains an improved performance on larger curvature variations. Based on these results, a practically usable range of the critical, non-dimensional design parameters is identified.
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