The Effect of Non-Fully Filled Gaps in Elastic Tribological Contacts

In recent papers, the authors of this paper investigated the dynamic behavior in partially fluid-filled tribological gaps with a novel modeling technique. The impact of the fluid amount towards the buildup of hydrodynamic pressures has been demonstrated. It shows high nonlinearities with respect to the correlation of the filling ratio and the mean pressure, in particular near the fully filled regime. So far, this modeling technique neglected deformations caused by the pressures in the gap. This paper is focused on fundamental studies on the impact of elastic deformations in combination with varying filling ratios onto the pressure characteristic. The studies are performed using an example of two ellipsoidal bodies moving relative to one another. The size of the ellipsoids is varied which allows modifying the gap topography. In this paper, the essential effect of elastic deformations at very small gaps is shown. It is discussed that it is very complex to formulate a general rule about parameter sets that give the possibility to neglect elastic deformations.

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Opracowanie ze środków MNiSW w ramach umowy 812/P-DUN/2016 na działalność upowszechniającą naukę.