The steady streaming oil film behaviour of oscillating sliding parts i
s important and requires clarification. The information available on s
uch problems is insufficient because they are too complicated to be an
alysed satisfactorily. In this paper an attempt is made to study the c
onsiderable effect of the geometrical configuration of the oscillating
parts on the performance of sliding bearings. The steady streaming pr
essure on oscillating sliding bearings of arbitrary shapes is obtained
with the objective of maximizing load-carrying capacity. The optimum
shape is found to depend primarily on the maximum film thickness and,
to a lesser extent, on the products of Reynolds and Strouhal numbers.
The optimization technique used is based on a random search method to
obtain an improved a priori estimate for the optimized parameters.