A numerical model for design and optimization of surface textures for tilting pad thrust bearings

A numerical model based on the Reynolds equation to study textured tilting pad thrust bearings considering mass-conserving cavitation and thermal effects is presented. A non-uniform and adaptive finite volume method is utilized and two methods are compared and selected regarding their efficiency in handling discontinuities; specifically placing additional nodes closely around discontinuities and directly incorporating discontinuities in the discrete system. Multithreading is applied to improve the computational performance and three root-finding methods to evaluate the bearing equilibrium are compared; namely Newton-Raphson method, Broyden's method with Sherman-Morrison formula and a continuation approach with fourth-order Runge-Kutta method. Results from the equivalent untextured bearing are utilized to accelerate the computation of the textured bearing and results are validated by comparison with CFD data.