| In this work, the lubrication problem associated with profiled hydrostatic thrust bearings is studied using analytical, numerical and experimental techniques. The coupled fluid-solid problem is solved using a sequentially coupled iterative method where the classical Reynolds equation is used to obtain the lubrication pressure and ABAQUS/STANDARD is used to obtain the bearing surface deformation. A novel feature of the work is that it considers several new designs obtained by varying the geometry of the socket which in turn alters the contact between the piston ball and the slipper bearing. The performance of the new designs are analyzed and compared with the standard design performance.;The surface profile of the bearings is measured experimentally and its effect on the bearing performance is studied numerically. The load carrying capacity results are compared with experimentally measured values. Further, for the standard design bearing, the effect of pocket width is also studied.;A numerical technique based on variational formulation is developed to study the bearing problem with translation. The results show that the translation speed effect is more significant in shallow pocket thrust bearings and generates a bigger tilt moment than in deep pocket thrust bearings. At high translation speeds, the pressure profile shows a sharp spike (Rayleigh step effect) at the trailing land step interface. A finite difference scheme is developed to capture the spike. Comparisons with fully three-dimensional CFD simulations indicate that the method works well in predicting the pressure spike as well as the tilting moment. |
