Study of inertia effect on thermohydrodynamic characteristics of Rayleigh step bearings by CFD method

This paper presents a numerical study about lubricant inertia effect on thermohydrodynamic (THD) characteristics of Rayleigh step bearings running under steady, incompressible and laminar condition. To reach this goal, the set of governing equations is solved numerically with and without considering the inertia terms. The discretized forms of the momentum and energy equations are obtained by the finite volume method and solved using the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) technique. These equations are solved simultaneously because the dependency of lubricant viscosity with temperature. The hydrodynamic and thermal behaviors of the slider step bearings are demonstrated by presenting several figures including the lubricant pressure and temperature distributions with and without considering the fluid inertia effect. Numerical results show that inertia term has considerable effect on THD characteristics of step bearings, especially when they run with high velocity of runner surface.