Evaluation of the wear behavior on nanostructure and mechanical characteristics of hydrodynamic sliding bearings

It is a fact that the shape of the bearing’s gap is one of the important elements of design. Also, experimental studies have shown that bearings with curved or rugged plates have better hydrodynamic performance. In the present paper, the effects of exponential gap-function as the sliding bearing’s gap have been studied on the bearing performance. For this purpose, new formulations of sliding bearing with a linear gap function have been developed. Then eroded slider bearing (since erosion provides curved surface) has been simulated. The governing equations are solved using the Finite Element Method (FEM) and the results have been presented. Besides, erosion adds debris to the oil which is simulated as additive nanoparticles in this study. The results of this analysis show that without considering solid nanoparticles, the load-bearing capacity force in the sliding bearing with exponential gap function increases 3.1% compared to the optimal linear gap. Furthermore, the nanoparticles analysis has shown that if the volume percentage of nanoparticles reaches 2%, the load-bearing capacity of sliding bearings shows an increase up to 13.1% compared to the optimal linear gap.