A Feature of Tapered Pressure-Dam Bearings.

This paper treats dynamic and static features of a sliding circular bearing with tapered grooves on its upper and lower sides. This bearing is called a tapered pressure-dam bearing in the present paper and designed in order to reduce lubricant pressure at high rotational speed. The preceding features of the bearing are analyzed by numerically solving the Reynolds equation and a heatconduction equation, considering the change of the ludricant temperature. The results show the designed bearing has a smaller value of cross-coupled stiffness coefficients when it is compared with a full circular bearing. Moreover, a Jeffcott rotor is used to investigate the stability characteristics of the bearing, and some design paremeters of the bearing are numerically determined to achieve good stability at high rotational speed. A comparison of the stability with a full circular bearing shows the proposed bearing possesses a better stability feature for a higher frequency region.