A HYDRODYNAMIC THRUST BEARING LUBRICATED BY A NON-NEWTONIAN GIESEKUS FLUID.

There exists a huge volume of studies of hydrodynamic and elastohydrodynamic lubrication problems for lubricants with Newtonian rheology. Lubricants with Newtonian rheology do not exhibit the usually observed experimentally behavior of having relatively high viscosity for low stresses and relatively low viscosity for high stresses. In this paper we extend the earlier conducted analysis of lubricants with a non-Newtonian Giesekus behavior for the case of thrust bearing modeling. The main goal of the paper is to obtain an analytical solution for a hydrodynamically thrust bearing lubricated by a fluid with the Giesekus rheology. This goal is achieved by careful application of perturbation methods. A three-term approximate analytical solution is obtained and its dependence on the problem input parameters is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]