Regular Article

Study on elastohydrodynamic lubrication performance of double-layer composite water-lubricated bearings

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China
² Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Precision Manufacturing and Non-traditional Machining, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China
³ Marine Design and Research Institute of China, Shanghai, China

^* e-mail: zhangxiulli@163.com

Received: 12 August 2022
Accepted: 12 December 2022

Abstract

Double-layer composite water-lubricated bearing is a new type of water-lubricated bearing which can integrate the good damping performance of low elastic under-layer bush and good tribological performance of plastic layer bush. This paper analyzes its elastohydrodynamic lubrication performance by fluid–structure interaction (FSI) method, and studies the effects of eccentricity ratio, rotational speed, elastic modulus distribution and thickness distribution of bearing bush on its lubrication performance. Results show that the lubrication performance of double-layer bearing is more like that of plastic bearing. As rotational speed and eccentricity ratio increase, the maximum water film pressure, the load carrying capacity and the maximum bush deformation increase significantly. As the elastic modulus of the low elastic under-layer bush decreases, the total bush deformation increases significantly, but the load carrying capacity decreases slightly. The bush thickness distribution influences the deformation distribution of both low elastic under-layer bush and plastic layer bush, but have little impact on the total bush deformation and bearing lubrication performance.