A CFD study on the significance of the cavitation modeling in textured bearing analysis

In this paper, the effect of cavitation modeling on the lubrication performance (i.e., load support, friction) is investigated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. The comparison of the lubrication performance between the analysis with the cavitation model and that without cavitation model is of particular interest. Results are presented for two patterns of textured bearing, i.e., bearing with high inertia and one with low inertia. Based on the simulation results, the inclusion of cavitation modeling has a strong effect of the load support as well as the friction force. The "no-cavitation" cases lead to under-estimation of the predicted performance of lubrication. It is also shown the presence of the inertia is proven to increase the load support.