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In this paper, analytical equations for the central film thickness in slender elliptic contacts are investigated. A comparison of state-of-the-art formulas with simulation results of a multilevel EHL solver is conducted and shows considerable deviation. Therefore, a new film thickness formula for slender elliptic contacts with variable ellipticity is derived. It incorporates asymptotic solutions, which results in validity over a large parameter domain. It captures the behaviour of increasing film thickness with increasing load for specific very slender contacts. The new formula proves to be significantly more accurate than current equations. Experimental studies and discussions on minimum film thickness will be presented in a subsequent publication.

This paper presents a novel condition monitoring method for rolling bearings, based on measuring the electric bearing impedance. The method can diagnose the presence of damage by frequency-domain analysis, and its extension along the raceway by time-domain analysis. The latter enables the assessment of the severity and the progression of bearing damage. A fatigue test shows that the occurrence of pittings in the bearing raceways causes characteristic peaks in the impedance signal, and that the duration of the peaks increases during damage progression. A second test series with artificial damage shows that the duration of the peaks depends on the bearing load and the length of the damage along the raceway and confirms the explanation hypothesis.

In this work we assess the applicability of the adjoint optimization technique for determining optimal surface topographies of two surfaces in relative motion in presence of a thin lubricant films that can cavitate. Among the existing numerical tools for topology optimization in engineering problems, the adjoint method represents a promising and versatile technique, which can also be applied to the field of full film tribology. In particular, the design of surfaces with complex textures can thoroughly benefit from this method, as it allows dealing with a large number of degrees of freedom at low computational cost. We show that this optimization method can be successfully applied to cavitating lubricant flows such as in pin-on-disc tribometers, giving the possibility to extend the results also to other typical applications such as journal and slider bearings. It is shown that the adjoint method can optimize the whole gap height distribution point by point in a more efficient way than traditional optimization approaches and parametric studies. In particular, thanks to the sensitivity analysis the adjoint method is able to find the placement and depth profile of each texture element.

This paper focuses on the friction behavior of jour- nal bearings operating from hydrodynamic to mixed lubrication regime where severe metal-metal contact occurs. Therefore, friction tests with two different static loads are carried out on the journal bear- ing test-rig from KS Gleitlager. The test results in form of Stribeck curves provide a solid base to proof the isothermal elastohydrodynamic simulation approach. The simulation approach solves the av- eraged Reynolds equation introduced by Patir and Cheng and considers metal-metal contact by using the Greenwood and Tripp contact model. All nec- essary surface parameters are derived from surface scans. No less essential in this approach are the experimentally identified lubricant properties under high pressure and high shear rate. The calculated friction torque matches the mea- surement results within the measurement uncertainty for a wide range of operation conditions. With the validated simulation approach the influence of surface smoothing due to metal-metal contact is discussed. Additionally, the limits of a constant boundary coef- ficient are identified and the effects of flow factors are presented.

A meshless generalized interpolation material point method for simulating the micro-milling process was developed. This method has several advantages over well-established approaches (such as finite elements) when it comes to large plastic strains and deformations, since it inherently does not suffer from tensile instability problems. The feasibility of the developed material point model for simulating micro-milling is verified against finite element simulations and experimental data. The model is able to successfully predict experimentally measured cutting forces and determine chip temperatures in agreement with conventional finite element simulations. After having verified the approach, the model was applied to perform extensive numerical 3D simulations of the micro-milling process. The goal is to evaluate the response of the micro-milling cutting forces as function of the hardening behavior of the micro-milled material. The meshless 3D simulations reveal a dependency of tool force slopes (with respect to the uncut chip thickness) on the hardening parameters. Based on these findings, a new approach is outlined to determine hardening parameters directly from two micro-milling experiments with distinct, sufficiently large uncut chip thicknesses.

We present an experimental and analysis workflow to characterize the tribological behavior and the wear resistance of porous journal bearing systems operating at high loads and small rotational speeds. Our approach consists of a laser-instrumented tribometer that allows parallel testing of five bearings, an experimental procedure that is optimized for producing sufficient wear during mixed lubrication operation while maintaining realistic operating conditions, as well as several methods to visualize and quantify bearing wear. The simultaneous testing of five bearings prevents outliers from distorting the results and yields a statistical estimation of the performance variations between nominally equivalent tribosystems. We showcase our approach by analyzing the influence of the bearing material and its porosity on mixed-lubrication friction and wear.

We employ a variant of the joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA) for identifying transient, temperature-dependent noise emitted from porous journal bearings operated at temperatures between −40 °C and 0 °C. This phenomenon, called “cold squealing”, is difficult to reproduce in laboratory environments, as it requires a suitable (and typically system-specific) resonator to occur. We systematically tested real-world bearings impregnated with various oils on a custom-designed experimental rig, fitted with a coolable sample holder and a vibration sensor, over a range of rotational speeds. By analyzing temperature-differential JTFA signal maps, we succeeded in detecting transient cold-squealing as well as ranking the bearing lubricants according to their low-temperature quiet running properties.