Investigation of the Fluid-Solid Thermal Coupling for Rolling Bearing under Oil-Air Lubrication

An excellent oil-air lubrication system helps to improve rolling bearing's working conditions and thus extend its service life span. Flowing and heat dissipating characteristics of oil-air media inside bearing chamber are very complicated due to the fluid-solid thermal coupling. Effects of fluid-solid thermal coupling are neglected in all previous simulation efforts. A numerical model for simulating the flowing inside bearing chamber is developed here based on an analytical fluid-solid thermal coupling method under oil-air lubrication. The effects of the coupling of air-oil flowing and heat dissipating in bearing chamber are predicted. The simulation results indicate that the coupling is influential in the performances of the flowing in rolling bearing under oil-air lubrication. With consideration of the coupling, the turbulence intensity, the turbulent kinetic energy, and the temperature of the rollers are predicted to be lower because part of the heat is carried out by the flow due to the heat transfer. On the contrary, the turbulent dissipation rate gets higher when considering the coupling effects. It is also interesting that the coupling effects have little influence on the flow pressure and the velocity, which is manifested by a little higher predicted value when considering the coupling.