On the Steady-State Behavior of Porous Journal Bearings - Bridging the Gap Between Simulation and Experiments

1. INTRODUCTION Porous journal bearings are a common and economic solution for lubrication applications where maintenance and access to the system are restricted or difficult. This work aims to provide the engineer with a validation of the theoretical model and simulation results put forward in an earlier study [1] with those obtained by recent experiments performed with industrially used bearings [2]. Adopting rather small " real-life " industrial rather than specifically designed bearings in tests represents a novelty with definite appeal to the practitioner. This fills a gap in the existing literature, all the more as it provides an intricate challenge caused by the increase of relative errors that are still difficult to properly cope with, given the more pronounced and unavoidable geometrical imperfections stemming from the manufacturing process and their variations due to different samples. These are still not easily quantified.