INTERACTIVE COMPUTER-GRAPHICS AND VOLUMETRIC VISUALIZATION FOR EHD LUBRICATION OF POINT CONTACTS

0A user friendly interactive computer graphics model to investigate he avily loaded lubricated circular and non-circular (elliptic) contacts has been developed. The model contains a pre-processor to allow the us er to input the material, lubricant properties, etc., into the numeric al elastohydrodynamic (EHD) lubrication solver. The EHD solver was dev eloped by Kim and Sadeghi (1), (2) to investigate the pressure, temper ature and film thickness distribution within the heavily loaded rollin g/sliding contacts. the post-processor allows the user to completely i nvestigate the relative magnitude and location of critical performance parameters. The graphics application uses volumetric visualization te chnique to provide the utmost inflexibility and interactivity. This pa per provides a description of the computer graphics package and a samp le of the results.