Evaluation of a volume of fluid CFD methodology for the oil film thickness estimation in an aero-engine bearing chamber

Bristot, Andrea; Morvan, Herve; Simmons, Kathy

Abstract

The presented work aims to identify a Volume of Fluid (VOF) CFD approach for the transient simulation of air/oil flows inside an aero-engine bearing chamber. Typically VOF requires relatively fine grids and consequently small time-steps to sufficiently resolve the formation of oil films and their interaction with air flows. The need to achieve a stationary-state which requires flow times on the order of seconds makes the compromise between simulation accuracy and simulation times a challenging choice when using the VOF method. In this work, the use of the Compressive Interface Reconstruction scheme with bounded second order implicit time discretization has enabled a significant speed-up of the simulation times against the previously adopted explicit Geometric-Reconstruction scheme. The results are evaluated against experimental data available in the literature.

Citation

Bristot, A., Morvan, H., & Simmons, K. Evaluation of a volume of fluid CFD methodology for the oil film thickness estimation in an aero-engine bearing chamber. Presented at ASME 2016 Turbo Expo

• Conference Name: ASME 2016 Turbo Expo
• End Date: Jun 17, 2016
• Acceptance Date: Jun 1, 2016
• Publication Date: Jun 13, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jul 27, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/795328
• Publisher URL: http://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=2554767
• Contract Date: Jul 27, 2016