Journal Press India^®

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Clearance plays a vital role in fluid film journal bearing and thus it’s important to consider its effect on performance prediction. In order to ascertain the extent to which relative clearance affects the performance of journal bearing system, this paper investigates the pressure distribution and the fluid film thickness in axial and circumferential directions of bearing at relative clearances. Under the steady state condition, the two- dimensional Reynolds equation is solved using finite difference based CFD method. The pressure of the fluid film is computed by using ADI technique. The code developed in FORTRAN 90 is debugged and validated for its accuracy. The results indicate that the fluid film pressure rises and the minimum fluid film thickness decrease with the reduction in relative clearance, which requires the optimal value of clearance ratio for better performance.

Keywords

Relative Clearance; length to diameter ratio; Minimum Oil Film Thickness; Reynolds Equation.

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