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romac |
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University of Virginia Rotating Machinery and Controls Laboratory P.O. Box 400746 122 Engineer’s Way Charlottesville, VA 22904 (434)924-3292 (434)982-2246(fax) |
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Rotating Machinery and Controls Laboratory |
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THRUST
Consultant: Minhui He Faculty: Paul Allaire Project Start Date: May 2005
Project Summary: THRUST is a three-dimensional finite element code that performs TEHD analysis for thrust bearings. It was originally developed by Dr. Ted Brockett and is considered the most advanced and powerful code for thrust bearing analysis. Unfortunately, the program has experienced a serious convergence problem when the flow is turbulent and heat conduction is included. After six months of work, we are happy to report that the cause of this convergence problem has been successfully identified. By changing the formulation of the energy section of the code, the separate iterations between the film and pad temperatures are now integrated into a single formulation. The new formulation has been combined with the other solvers in the code and works very well for bearings with tilting pads. Other fixed pad geometries are currently under improvement using this single formulation approach. Potential future upgrades include dynamically allocatable arrays, improved search of the pad tilt angle, new pad geometries and modeling of the direct lubrication.
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