Review of Thermal, Turbulent and Misalignment Effects on Hydrodynamic Journal Bearings

As there is an increasing demand for high performance turbo-machinery hydrodynamic bearings are expected to run at high speed and high load operating conditions with low power loss and oil flow. Bearings play a critical role to achieve machine’s overall reliability level. This paper reviews various analytical and experimental studies that have been done on hydrodynamic bearing performance published in various journals. The analytical study brings challenges in formulating the boundary conditions consideration of thermal effects on governing equations effect of turbulence and consideration of re-circulating oil with incoming oil in inlet oil groove etc. Experimental studies pose the challenges on the measurement of performance parameters such as temperature distribution oil film distribution etc. From the survey, many researchers found that thermal and turbulent effects had the considerable impact on predicting accurate static and dynamic performance of the hydrodynamic journal bearing.