Joint Clearances With Lubricated Long Bearings in Multibody Mechanical Systems

Proper modeling of joint clearance is of great importance in the analysis and design of multibody mechanical systems. The clearance may be due to wear or imperfection in manufacturing. When there is no lubricant in the clearance, solid-to-solid contact occurs. The impulse due to contact between the links is transmitted throughout the system. The presence of a lubricant avoids such contact, as the hydrodynamic forces developed by the lubricant film support the loads acting on the bodies and prevent the bodies from coming into contact. In this paper, an analysis of revolute joint clearances in multibody mechanical systems with and without lubricant is presented. Squeeze as well as viscous effects are considered utilizing the hydrodynamic theory of lubrication in long bearings. Unlike the traditional machine design approach, the instantaneous lubricant forces are the unknown and evaluated in terms of the known geometrical position and velocity of the journal and bearing. In the case of analysis of a joint clearance with no lubricant, a modified Hertzian relation is used to model the impact or contact between the journal and bearing, which includes a hysteresis damping term to account for the energy dissipation during impact. The methodology is applied for the analysis of a slider-crank mechanism having a clearance in the piston pin. The simulations are carried out with and without lubricant and the results are compared. It is shown that the lubricant results in a steady motion with fewer peaks in the required cranking moment for the system. [S1050-0472(00)01804-3]