Air–oil two-phase flow and oil penetration characteristics of angular contact ball bearing under oil jet lubrication: Numerical and experimental investigations

An interacting and complicating phenomenon between the angular contact ball bearing in the high-speed level and the oil jet flow is widely investigated by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method to track the oil–air two-fluid. First of all, the oil penetration rate is introduced to evaluate the lubrication and cooling performance of the jet-lubricated ball bearing. Then, a specific test rig was designed and developed to quantitatively estimate the oil penetration rate of the ball bearing, compared to the rate values of bearing components that were also calculated from the CFD investigations. The results indicated that they were all pretty much in agreement. Furthermore, the influences of the operating conditions (rotational speed and oil flow rate, etc.) and geometry parameters (number of rolling elements) on the penetrating performance of lubricating oil are explored in detail. The proposed CFD method presents a physics-based estimation of the oil–air two-phase flow of ball bearings under various parameters.