Effect of Boundary Slip on The Load Support in A Lubricated Sliding Contact

In recent years it has been shown experimentally by a number of researchers that, for certain engineered surfaces, the no‐slip boundary condition is not a valid one. Moreover, researchers demonstrate that slip patterning can considerably improve the performance of lubricated contact. In nano‐electro‐mechanical system (NEMS) containing moving components, there is a need to achieve low friction and high load support by lubrication. However, many researches were focused only on how to reduce the friction without paying much attention to the hydrodynamic pressure, i.e. load support. In this paper, the Reynolds model with slip boundary is presented for investigating the effect of slip boundary on the load support in a lubricated sliding contact. A finite volume method analysis is proposed in order to study the influence of boundary slip over the load support and friction. Numerical results of the extended Reynolds equation show that a homogeneously distributed slip boundary applied on a surface has a disadvantage with respect to the load support. It is found that in a lubricated system one of the lubricated surfaces is treated as homogeneous slip boundary, a lower load support with a reduced friction force is obtained. However, if that surface is designed as heterogeneous slip, i.e. partly boundary slip, the load support is about twice that of corresponding traditional sliding contact, even when there is no wedge effect.