The beneficial effect of superhydropobic layer addition on lubrication behavior in bearing application

Recently, superhydrophobic materials got a lot of attention for special applications, such as anti stiction and energy conversion. In this paper, a theoretical investigation was carried out to study the effect of adding a superhydrophobic layer on the tribological performance of bearings and further compared it to textured bearings. In doing so, different texture depths were also studied and compared to each other to find the optimal textured bearing. The superhydrophobic behaviour was characterized by the Navier slip model. The results showed that the presence of a superhydrophobic layer in a bearing could result in a significant improvement in the hydrodynamic pressure distribution as well as the shear stress compared to a textured bearing.