A tribometer and methodology for wear and friction testing of porous journal bearings at elevated temperatures

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims on a methodology to overcome the fact that conventional service life testing of porous journal bearings (PJBs) requires long test times and is not economical. Design/methodology/approach This paper sketches out a pathway to strongly accelerated life tests for PJBs enabled by high load and elevated temperature, which saves months or even years of testing. The testing time is not only reduced to a few weeks, but the results are also statistically secured via a multiple test rig construction of a custom-made tribometer. Findings An exemplary bearing-lubricant combination is tested in the mixed lubrication regime, where the coefficient of friction is monitored during the test. Originality/value A Weibull curve is fitted to the experimental results to show the survival probability of the combination over time. Peer review The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-08-2019-0351/

Identification of a Material–Lubricant Pairing and Operating Conditions That Lead to the Failure of Porous Journal Bearing Systems

“…The authors provide here only essential information for understanding the experimental procedure and the custom-made test rig, since these aspects have been already presented in previous publications [18,19]. This paper focuses therefore on the tribological results obtained from Fig.…”

“…These two different techniques for measuring the CoF were used in different stages of the tribological test, as will be explained in the following paragraphs. The reader is referred to previous publications [18,19] for more in-depth details on the rig construction and its technical features. Five wear tests were performed in parallel for each bearing material-lubricant combination.…”

“…As PJBs are designed for lifetimes exceeding 10,000 h [17], experimental tests used to be costly, as a single test could go on for several weeks, so a more systematic test approach can reduce testing times and costs. For this reason, some of the authors developed a multi-bearing test rig to be able to test 5 bearings at the same time, an advantage that may be used either for increasing the data acquisition throughput or for obtaining a reliable statistical analysis by testing nominally identical bearing systems in parallel [18,19]. Although tribological studies of PJBs are not a new topic in literature, a more in-depth approach is required especially for those operating under harsher conditions such as mixed lubrication.…”