Abstract
This article presents the results of experimental investigations of lubricant flow out of a micropocket in a conformal contact due to surface shear. A test rig was designed and developed to perform a micropocket flow under boundary and starved lubrication conditions. The test rig consists of a laser-machined circular micropocket on a flat specimen operating against a rotating glass disk under an applied load. Silicone oil was used as the test fluid. Optical microvideography was used to investigate lubricant extraction from micropockets. A high-speed camera was used to observe the lubricant extraction phenomena from micropockets under various operating conditions. Microparticle image velocimetry was also implemented to quantify and analyze lubricant flow from a micropocket. The following results were obtained: (Citation1) the role of a micropocket by comparing the lubrication mechanism of a contact with and without a micropocket; (Citation2) the effects of load, speed, and micropocket geometry on lubricant extraction; and (Citation3) the detail of the micropocket flow during the extraction using microparticle image velocimetry (μ-PIV).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors express their deepest appreciation to Honeywell for their support of this project.
Review led by Michael Khonsari
Notes
1EDPIV was completed at the National Center for Physical Acoustics (NCPA) at the University of Mississippi in cooperation with the Micro Fluidics Laboratory at Purdue University for microscale PIV application.