• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.17-23
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• 2024

This study analyzes the thermal effects on the performance of an air foil thrust bearing (AFTB) using COMSOL Multiphysics to approximate actual bearing behavior under real conditions. An AFTB is a sliding-thrust bearing that uses air as a lubricant to support the axial load. The AFTB consists of top and bump foils and supports the rotating disk through the hydrodynamic pressure generated by the wedge effect from the inclined surface of the top foil and the elastic deformation of the bump foils, similar to a spring. The use of air as a lubricant has some advantages such as low friction loss and less heat generation, enabling air bearings to be widely used in high-speed rotating systems. However, even in AFTB, the effects of energy loss due to viscosity at high speeds, interface frictional heat, and thermal deformation of the foil caused by temperature increase cannot be ignored. Foil deformation derived from the thermal effect influences the minimum decay in film thickness and enhances the film pressure. For these reasons, performance analyses of isothermal AFTBs have shown few discrepancies with real bearing behavior. To account for this phenomenon, a thermal-fluid-structure analysis is conducted to describe the combined mechanics. Results show that the load capacity under the thermal effect is slightly higher than that obtained from isothermal analysis. In addition, the push and pull effects on the top foil and bump foil-free edges can be simulated. The differences between the isothermal and thermal behaviors are discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.89-92
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• 2011

The modeling of thermodynamic non-idealities and transport anomalies is a crucial prerequisite to realistically simulate the mixing and combustion processes of liquid propellants injected above critical pressures. This study has developed a specific set of subroutines to calculate the thermodynamic and transport properties based on the generalized cubic equation of state (EoS) in a coupled manner with the standard chemical kinetics packages (Chemkin). The existing flamelet analysis code is extended with the real-fluid package and applied to numerical investigation of local flame structures of kerosene and liquid oxygen at high pressure conditions relevant to the actual rocket engines.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.729-732
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• 2010

The present study has been motivated by the development of a reliable numerical methodology for simulation of kerosene/LOx coaxial swirl injectors. To deal with thermodynamic non-ideality and anomalies of transport properties pronounced at supercritical pressures, a set of subroutine libraries has been constructed based on the cubic equations of state, and applied to an existing flamelet analysis code. For computational efficiency, two-dimensional axisymmetric RANS formulation with swirl was adopted and validated successfully against an isothermal coaxial swirling jet. For the actual problem with high pressure combustion, however, numerical results show that the RANS models yield excessive production of turbulence probably due to high density gradient magnitude in the vicinity of mixing layer of swirling film flow, and imply strongly further improvement of the turbulence models.