ABSTRACT
The analysis and design of hydrodynamic journal bearings has a great attention to the engineers. Emphasis has been given to design those bearings so as to avoid metal-to-metal contact .To design these elements, few important characteristics, like load-carrying capacity, maximum pressure and their location lubricant flow requirement between mating surfaces and so on are to be predicted accurately. These parameters can be determined if the pressure within the clearance space between contact surfaces is known. To study and find this pressure one has to solve in general the Reynolds’s equation that governs the flow of lubricant inside the clearance space. Moreover the accuracy of the results obtained by FEM is mainly depends on the proper finite element modeling that includes proper selection of the type and size of finite elements and solution algorithm. As computing cost and time increases the size (i.e. the number) of elements increases, one has to determine the minimum number of elements those can be used to obtain the accurate solution. Therefore this work is aimed to study the effect of number of finite elements on the computed result of hydrodynamic journal bearing and to determine minimum number of finite elements to be used in the analysis of the journal bearing.
