Abstract
Abstract
In this paper, a thermohydrodynamic (THD) analysis of vapour cavitation in steady loaded and finite length journal bearing has been developed using three different cavitation models. It involves the simultaneous solution of the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes and energy equations by CFD technique. An orthogonal grid is generated using analytic transformation functions and the governing equations are transformed for use in the computational plane. These equations are made discrete by means of control volume method and the well-known SIMPLE algorithm is used for the pressure-velocity calculation. In the cavitated part of the lubricant flow with a mixture of vapour and liquid, three different cavitation models are used to obtain the thermal behaviour of lubricant flow in this region. In all of the three cavitation models, an attempt is made to replace a single phase fluid with equivalent properties instead of the mixture of liquid and vapour. The calculated results are compared with the theoretical results of other investigators and also with experiment, and the abilities of the proposed cavitation models to predict THD characteristics of journal bearings are examined. The numerical results show that the third model in which the liquid fraction is calculated based on continuity requirement for three-dimensional cavitated flow, predicts well the lubricant pressure and temperature fields in journal bearings.
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