Incorporation of THD boundary conditions for the efficient evaluation of journal bearing performance

The evaluation of the thermohydrodynamic (THD) performance of journal bearings continues to be an important issue. This is particularly so for high speed or heavily loaded bearing designs. This paper focuses attention on the thermal boundary conditions at the lubricant-bearing interface. The solid component conduction problem is solved in advance of the main THD analysis. Boundary conditions are then imposed on the lubricant THD analysis through use of an appropriate influence coefficient matrix that incorporates the solid component conduction problem. This avoids the current practice of solving the lubricant and solid component problems separately in an iterative loop to achieve continuous temperatures and heat fluxes at the interface. Instead, only the lubricant problem needs to be solved using the boundary conditions imposed by the influence coefficient matrix. Copyright © 2007 by ASME.