A two-dimensional starved lubrication analysis method for textured surfaces

The starved lubrication is common in engine. However, there are only few studies on starved lubrication problem for textured surfaces. In particular, for the textured surface, a two-dimensional solution is required to study their performances clearly, by considering the pattern and distribution of textured cells. This article presents a new analysis method for the two-dimensional starved lubrication problems with the textured surfaces. In the starved model, the inlet boundary condition of oil film is required and needs to be updated over the process of calculation. In order to obtain the inlet boundary condition, the flow conservation equations at the inlet region are built to determine the position of the attaching point. Meanwhile, as the two-dimensional code is expensive in the computational cost, the multigrid method is employed to accelerate the convergence of pressure. The inlet boundary condition should be transferred between the coarse grids and the fine grids. In this way, solutions for the starved lubrication are offered for an efficient implementation. The starved lubrication model is successfully applied in the ring-liner system. The effects of the surface features on the inlet boundary, wear and friction loss are discussed. It is found that the surface texturing can improve the performance of the ring-liner system under the staved lubrication.