CFD analysis of artificial slippage and surface texturing in lubricated sliding contact considering cavitation

The present paper explores the effect of slip variation for Newtonian and non-Newtonian lubricants on textured slider bearing performance considering cavitation. Investigations are carried out by using a numerical method based on commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamic) software ANSYS for fluid flow phenomenon to assess the tribological characteristic (i.e. hydrodynamic pressure distribution) of a lubricated sliding contact. The Zwart-Gerber-Belamri model for cavitation is adopted. To model hydrophobicity, i.e. slippage, the enhanced user-defined-function (UDF) in the FLUENT® package is developed. The numerical results show that the cavitation modeling has a huge effect on the performance. Neglecting the cavitation leads to a less accurate result. Also, regarding the effect of slip variation, it is found that the single slip is the best pattern to improve the pressure profile.