Session: 23-01, Foil bearings

Paper Number: 126255

126255 - Performance of Heavily Loaded Textured Gas Foil Bearings Based on the Multigrid Method 

The low viscosity of the lubricated gas and the compliance of the foil structure result in a lower load capacity of the gas foil bearing. Surface texturing technology is a novel avenue for enhancing bearing performance. The introduction of texture elevates the demand for grid refinement, and the numerical computation of the bearing under heavily loaded conditions involves numerous supplementary iterative operations, thereby intensifying the complexity of numerical solutions for bearing characteristics. The multigrid method is employed to investigate the static and dynamic characteristics of textured gas foil bearings under heavily loaded conditions.

This paper established the pressure governing equation considering the gas rarefaction effects. The cumulative eccentricity method was applied to analyze the bearing’s behavior under heavy-load operating conditions. Additionally, the static and dynamic characteristics of the bearing were determined using both Newton-Raphson iterative method and the perturbation method. On this basis, the numerical solution efficiency of the direct method, the iterative method, and the multigrid method were analyzed. Compared to the small-eccentricity conditions, this study investigated the impact of texture parameters such as textured portion and texture depth on the static and dynamic characteristics of the bearing with an eccentricity ratio of 4.

The results demonstrate that the multigrid method achieves the highest computational efficiency, with an improvement exceeding 50% with an eccentricity ratio of 4 compared to traditional solving method. With a fixed starting position of the textured area, the bearing exhibits maximum load capacity when the circumferential textured portion ranges from 0.3 to 0.4, and the axial textured portion ranges from 0.7 to 0.9. As the eccentricity ratio increases from 0.1 to 4, the enhancing effect of surface texturing on load capacity decreases by 6.78%, while the friction-reduction effect increases by 4.25%. Furthermore, critical mass calculations indicate improved bearing stability with a large eccentricity. This study shows that suitable texture parameters effectively improve the bearing performance under heavy-load conditions, while the multigrid method can efficiently solve the above problems.

Presenting Author: Jiazhen Han School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology

Presenting Author Biography: PHD candidate, research interests are gas foil bearing and rotor dynamics

Authors:

Jiazhen Han School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
Guanghui Zhang School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
Kefan Xu School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
Wenjie Gong School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
Wenlong Sun School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
Zhongwen Huang Nanjing Engineering Institute of Aircraft Systems