Influence of Texture Portion and Dimple Area Density on the Tribological Characteristics of Dimple Textured Hydrodynamic Journal Bearing

Abstract There is a growing interest towards the textured bearings. The normal surface texture has the shape of micro-dimples with preselected diameter, area density and depth. The use of different amount of texturing and dimple area density, can be an effective way to improve tribological properties of textured bearing. In the present study, the tribological properties, of the dimple textured journal bearing of L/D = 2, such as attitude angle, load carrying capacity, friction variable and flow coefficient are estimated for different texture portion and dimple area density. The computationally efficient Progressive mesh densification method is implemented for the numerical solution. The governing Reynolds equation is discretized with the finite difference scheme and then solved using Gauss Seidel method coupled with Successive over relaxation scheme. The numerical results show that the flow coefficient and attitude angle has been improved significantly with texture portion variation. Similarly, when the dimple area density is varied, there is significant improvement in flow coefficient and attitude angle resulting in the maximum flow coefficient at the dimple area density of 0.25 and minimum attitude angle, at the eccentricity ratios from 0.5 to 0.7, for the dimple area density of 0.20. However, the texture portion and dimple area density have no positive influence on the load carrying capacity and friction variable.