Surface Roughness Effect on the Performance of a Magnetic Fluid Based Hyperbolic Slider Bearing

An attempt has been made to study and analyze the performance of a rough hyperbolic slider bearing under the presence of a magnetic fluid lubricant. The magnetic field is oblique to the stator and the bearing surfaces are considered to be transversely rough. The roughness of the bearing surface is characterized by a stochastically random variable with non-zero mean, variance and skewness. The concerned Reynolds equation is stochastically averaged with respect to the random roughness parameters. This stochastically averaged equation is solved with suitable boundary conditions to obtain the expression of pressure distribution, which is then used to calculate the load carrying capacity. Besides, friction is also computed. The results show that the transverse surface roughness affects the performance of the bearing system adversely. It is seen that the load carrying capacity increases while friction decreases due to the magnetic fluid lubricant. It is revealed that the negative effect of transverse roughness can be minimized to certain extent by the positive effect of the magnetization in the case of negatively skew roughness. It is noticed that positively skewed roughness and variance (+ve) decrease the friction. Thus, this article offers some scopes for reducing the friction, increasing the load carrying capacity at the same time. This article may also be prevailed some measures for the extending the life period of the bearing system.