Partial Lubrication of Full Cylindrical Bearings

The phenomenon of cavitation in bearings is often studied under the assumption that the pressure and the pressure gradient both vanish along the unknown boundary of the cavitation bubble. However, such conditions (often named after Swift and Stieber) may be inconsistent with mass conservation. The discrepancy is particularly striking when the case of long bearings is studied within the so called Sommerfeld approximation. Therefore a complete analysis of the Sommerfeld case is carried out here again (in particular condition of starving feed are examined) under a hypothesis which allows mass-conservation and leads to a boundary relation of the Jakobson type.