Investigation on the oil transfer behaviors and the air-oil interfacial flow patterns in a ball bearing under different capillary conditions

Abstract Lubricant oil is crucial to the rolling bearings as main medium of lubricating, cooling, cleaning, and so on. The starvation in around contacts harmful performance fatigue life bearings. Therefore, it necessity understand behaviors transfer patterns air-oil two-phase flow bearings, especially with influence different capillary properties. This work established a transient model ball bearing based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Groups cases are implemented investigate under conditions speed, surface tension, viscosity. Flow classified by morphological features flow. Staged phenomena analyzed reach good agreements observations from experiments. It found that distribution strongly related speed ratio viscosity tension ( μ / σ ). maps imply levels number (Ca) may be boundaries critical points pattern transition between bearing.