STOCHASTIC FEM ANALYSIS OF FINITE HYDRODYNAMIC BEARINGS WITH ROUGH SURFACES

A Reynolds-type equation for finite hydrodynamic bearings, (plane slid er and cylindrical journal), with rough surfaces (longitudinal, transv erse and isotropic roughnesses), has been solved using the stochastic finite element method considering film thickness to be a stationary, e rgodic stochastic process with mean zero. Mean steady-state characteri stics have been obtained and compared with those obtained by previous investigators. The effect of a spatially randomly varying component of roughness has been studied by giving different input standard deviati ons of film thickness and calculating output standard deviation of max imum pressure for different scales of fluctuation using the first-orde r second-moment method.