Investigation of Pressure Distribution in Hydrodynamic Radial Journal Bearings with Finite Difference Method

As the most important performance parameter of journal bearings, which are widely used in industry, load carrying capacity is directly related to pressure occurred between shaft and bearing house. Occurred pressure is obtained with numerical solving under different boundary conditions. There are three different boundary conditions which are Sommerfeld, Half-Sommerfeld and Reynolds. In this study, pressure distribution of journal bearings are obtained and compared with each other under mentioned boundary conditions. First, Reynolds equation defining Cartesian coordinate system is rewritten in polar coordinate system and then the equation is made non-dimensional. The non-dimensional equation is adapted to finite difference method and made proper for iterative solution. Pressure distribution and load carrying capacity are obtained for different parameters by a generated MATLAB program. Obtained pressure distribution is validated with a previous study