A computational fluid dynamics analysis on air bearing designs

Tan, I.W. (2015) A computational fluid dynamics analysis on air bearing designs. Bachelor's Thesis, Mathematics.

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Abstract

This report treats the results of a research project on simulating the air flow in aerostatic thrust air bearings with the Open Source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package OpenFOAM. The type of air bearing considered in this research is a simple type circular bearing with eight orifices that are equally distributed over a concentric circle. In this report we first present some background information on air bearings, treat the fluid dynamics that is involved and consider the previously conducted research on computational models of air bearings. Next, we will discuss the simulations that we performed where we varied the choice of solvers, boundary conditions, turbulence models and the viscosity parameter. Lastly, we will analyze the results and give suggestions for future work on this subject. We find that manually altering the viscosity via the Sutherland Coefficient $A_s$ provides a stable initial flow, from which we can incrementally lower the viscosity back to values closer to the realistic value. Furthermore we find that the solvers sonicFoam and rhoCentralFoam show similar behaviour on our meshes and that sonicFoam and rhoSimpleFoam in OpenFOAM 1.7 perform differently from sonicFoam and rhoSimpleFoam in OpenFOAM 2.3.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis)
Degree programme:	Mathematics
Thesis type:	Bachelor's Thesis
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	15 Feb 2018 08:05
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2018 08:05
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/12866

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