WEIGHTED FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR COMPUTING NONLINEAR OIL-FILM FORCES IN JOURNAL BEARING

Based on the variational inequality theory of hydrodynamic lubrication,this paper presents a fast method to calculate the oil-film forces of journal bearings with the Reynolds boundary condition.Chosen a felicitous weighting function,two-dimensional questions could be interpolated by one-dimensional elements with high accuracy.The method gives the coefficient matrix in tri-diagonal form and then discrete variational inequalities are solved by a direct method.Numerical examples show that the results of this method agree well with those of the oil-film force model computed by the two-dimensional finite element method,and that significant computing time is saved.This low time-consuming method can be used to analyze the nonlinear dynamics of the rotor-bearing system.