Increasing the thermal loading of bearing chambers in modern aero-engines requires advanced techniques for the determination of heat transfer characteristics. In the present study, film thickness and heat transfer measurements have been carried out for the complex two-phase oil/air flow in bearing chambers. In order to ensure real engine conditions, a new test facility has been built up, designed for rotational speeds up to n = 16,000 rpm and maximum flow temperatures of Tmax = 473 K. Sealing air and lubrication oil flow can be varied nearly in the whole range of aero-engine applications. Special interest is directed toward the development of an ultrasonic oil film thickness measuring technique, which can be used without any reaction on the flow inside the chamber. The determination of local heat transfer at the bearing chamber housing is based on a well-known temperature gradient method using surface temperature measurements and a finite element code to determine temperature distributions within the bearing chamber housing. The influence of high rotational speed on the local heat transfer and the oil film thickness is discussed.

A proper matching of the heat transfer to the lubrication oil in bearing chambers and subsequent vent and scavenge pipes is one of the major tasks in the design process of secondary air/lubrication oil systems of modern jet engines. For a calculation of lubrication oil flow rates, which should be kept as small as possible in order to reduce parasitic losses due to larger pumps, filters and coolers, a sufficient knowledge of all heat transfer phenomena involved in bearing chamber flows is required. Beside heat sources such as the bearing friction, the heated sealing air flow and the churning and ventilation of two-phase mixtures, the heat transfer at the housing walls has to be considered. The present paper deals with an experimental investigation of the latter effect based on engine relevant pressure and temperature levels bearing chamber operating conditions. Air/oil flow heat transfer measurements at the internal bearing chamber walls are described utilizing the temperature gradient method. It is a stationary technique based on a two-dimensional finite element calculation procedure. Influences of sealing air flow rate, lubrication oil flow rate and rotational speed on local heat transfer coefficients are discussed. Mean heat transfer coefficients that have been calculated from local data are presented in terms of operational parameters.

A fundamental study has been performed to examine oil film disintegration mechanisms at the rim of a rotating disk. The configuration investigated is an abstraction of one of the droplet generation sources in an aeroengine bearing compartment. The paper aims to contribute to both the determination of directly applicable droplet characteristics and the establishment of a database that can be used for the development of droplet generation models. The near-term objectives of the study are (i) to identify disintegration modes relevant with respect to aeroengine bearing compartment operating conditions, (ii) to determine droplet sizes under those operating conditions, and (iii) to measure individual droplet diameter/velocity relationships. The long-term objective is to incorporate this information into advanced CFD-based design tools. The disintegration modes identified here were similar to previously reported flow regimes generated by rotary atomizers. However, slightly different transition characteristics are documented for the turbine oil considered here, indicating a transition occurring at either higher speeds or higher flow rates. Droplet diameters and velocities are presented for relevant bearing compartment conditions. In this mode, droplet diameters appear to be insensitive to the volume flow rate, but show a finer atomization for increasing rotational speeds. Eventually a speed is reached beyond which no further droplet diameter reduction is obtained. For the first time, size class resolved droplet velocities are presented. A variation of operating parameters at a constant radial location does not have a significant impact on either the normalized droplet velocity or the flow angle. Radial traverses show a decrease of the droplet velocity with increasing distance from the rim of the disk and a transition from a more tangentially oriented droplet trajectory to a more radial motion.

The present paper deals with oil droplet flow phenomena in aero engine bearing chambers. An experimental investigation of droplet sizes and velocities utilizing a Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA) has been performed for the first time in bearing chamber atmospheres under real engine conditions. Influences of high rotational speeds are discussed for individual droplet size classes. Although this is an important contribution to a better understanding of the droplet flow impact on secondary air/oil system performance, an analysis of the droplet flow behavior requires an incorporation of numerical methods because detailed measurements as performed here suffer from both strong spatial limitations with respect to the optical accessibility in real engine applications and constraints due to the extremely time-consuming nature of an experimental flow field analysis. Therefore, further analysis is based on numerical methods. Droplets characterized within the experiments are exposed to the flow field of the gaseous phase predicted by use of our well-known CFD code EPOS. The droplet trajectories and velocities are calculated within a Lagrangian frame of reference by forward numerical integration of the particle momentum equation. This paper has been initiated rather to show a successful method of bearing chamber droplet flow analysis by a combination of droplet sizing techniques and numerical approaches than to present field values as a function of all operating parameters. However, a first insight into the complex droplet flow phenomena is given and specific problems in bearing chamber heat transfer are related to the droplet flow.

For the design of secondary air and lubrication oil systems, a sufficient knowledge of two-phase flow and heat transfer phenomena under bearing chamber flow conditions is required. The characterization of oil film flows at the bearing chamber walls is one of the major tasks for a better understanding of these processes and, therefore, a necessity for improvements of the efficiency of aero engines. The present paper gives a contribution to this subject. Utilizing a fiber-optic LDV setup, measurements of oil film velocity profiles have been performed in our high-speed bearing chamber rig simulating real engine conditions. All data have been compared with different theoretical approaches, which have been derived from a force balance at a liquid film element, including geometric conditions and temperature dependent fluid properties, and by approaches for the eddy viscosity available in the literature.