Effects of Artificial Roughness on Journal Bearings using Non-Newtonian Lubricants: A CFD Cavitation Study

The enhanced shear properties of non-Newtonian fluids have garnered considerable interest, resulting in their growing utilization as lubricants. This work explores the lubrication mechanism of journal bearings with surface roughness by analyzing the influence of cavitation in lubricated textured contacts. Commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software is utilized to employ numerical techniques for evaluating the tribological characteristics, namely the distribution of hydrodynamic pressure, in lubricated textured contacts. The analytical results indicate that incorporating surface roughness can significantly enhance the hydrodynamic pressure, leading to an augmentation in load-carrying capacity, a drop in the friction coefficient, and a drop in acoustic levels. Furthermore, the quantitative results indicate that incorporating cavitation modeling significantly affects the performance. Disregarding cavitation results in less precise outcomes.