A variational principle for a thin-film incompressible flow with viscous dissipation has already been formulated as the basis of a finite-element analysis and applied to solve the oil-film energy equation for the case of infinitely wide thrust bearings (1)†. Here, the finite-element method is extended to a three-dimensional oil film, the pressure and temperature distributions of which agree very well with those obtained from other theoretical and experimental work. Allowance for various factors affecting thrust-pad performance, such as hot oil carry-over, rotor surface temperature and pad radial tilting, in the non-isoviscous bearing analysis has been shown to improve the agreement between numerical simulation and experiment.
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