INVESTIGATION ON THE APPLICATION OF THE BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD TO THE SPILL GROOVED THRUST BEARING

An application of the boundary element method (BEM) is presented to calculate the behaviors of a spiral grooved thrust bearing (SGTB). The basic reason is that the SGTB has very complex boundary conditions that can hinder the effective or sufficient applications of the finite difference method (FDM) and the finite element method (FEM), despite some existing work based on the FDM and the FEM. In other to apply the BEM, the pressure control equation, i. e., Reynolds' equation, is first transformed into Laplace's and Poisson's form of the equations. Discretization of the SGTB with a set of boundary elements is thus explained in detail, which also includes the handling of boundary conditions. The Archimedean SGTB is chosen as an example of the application Of BEM, and the relationship between the behaviors and structure parameters of the bearing are found and discussed through this calculation. The obtained results lay a solid foundation for a further work of the design of the SGTB.