A soft self-adaptive surface texturing to improve dynamic stability of bearing sliders under speed varying conditions

This study attempts to design a soft self-adaptive surface texturing by inducing beneficial deformation, to achieve better tribological performances with operating condition variations. Based on this idea, a novel texturing with soft bottom is conceptually proposed to enhance the dynamic stability of bearing sliders at time varying speeds, and evaluated by a transient numerical model established specifically. Under four different time-dependent speeds, the performances of the soft bottom texturings and the rigid texturings with different depth are compared. It is found that the soft bottom texturing deforms at high speeds to reduce the excessive hydrodynamic pressure and film fluctuation range, and diminishes the deformation to maintain the load support and avoid surface contact when the speed is low, self-adaptively.