Study on Structure and Performance Optimization for Spherical Stern Bearing Based on ANSYS

Spherical stern bearing is kind of new bearing, which combines ordinary water lubricated stern bearing with sphere bearing. It has function to adjust contact situation of stern bearing and stern shaft automatically, decreases pressure peak, leads to pressure distribution on the bearing being more uniform, helps to overcome the problem of local overload to avoid edge effect and improves damping performance. On the base of the ANSYS software, the contact deformation and pressure calculation of spherical stern bearing are carried out to compare with ordinary stern bearing and analyse the effectiveness of reducing pressure on bearing, optimization problems of the sphere position and sphere diameter are discussed, which shows that the contact pressure achieves a minimum when the sphere is located at intermediate position of bearing bush and the maximum contact pressure decreases with the increase of sphere diameter, and they have linear relation.