Soft lubrication: The elastohydrodynamics of nonconforming and conforming contacts

By J. Skotheim, L. Mahadevan. 2004

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We study the lubrication of fluid-immersed soft interfaces and show that elastic deformation couples tangential and normal forces and thus generates lift. We consider materials that deform easily, due to either geometry (e.g., a shell) or constitutive properties (e.g., a gel or a rubber), so that the effects of pressure and temperature on the fluid properties may be neglected. Four different system geometries are considered: a rigid cylinder moving parallel to a soft layer coating a rigid substrate; a soft cylinder moving parallel to a rigid substrate; a cylindrical shell moving parallel to a rigid substrate; and finally a cylindrical conforming journal bearing coated with a thin soft layer. In addition, for the particular case of a soft layer coating a rigid substrate, we consider both elastic and poroelastic material responses. For all these cases, we find the same generic behavior: there is an optimal combination of geometric and material parameters that maximizes the dimensionless normal force as a fu...

Subfields: Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25a2203521d21bd1d194d96d972a3209d2d4b0ea