Effects of textured surfaces on the properties of hydrodynamic bearing

Hydrodynamic bearing is becoming an indispensable component of high-accuracy devices such as high-speed machine tools. Recently, the study of textured surface bearing has become one of the highly researched topics. Among the different types of surface texture, partially textured bearing shows outstanding performances on anti-vibration. However, most of the research focuses on the theoretical models of partial texture. In this paper, several bearings with no texture, full texture and partial texture are fabricated for stability and stiffness tests. The result shows that the partially textured bearings with 60% of textured ratio and 4.9% of area ratio exhibit the best properties, which could decrease the maximum amplitude by 45.8% at 9000 rpm. In addition, the textured surface with the optimal textured ratio of 60% can reduce the static stiffness and improve the dynamic stiffness. Therefore, partially textured bearings are particularly significant to the stability enhancement of the bearing system, which can lead to the performance and security improvement of the sliding bearing in high-speed applications.