A TRANSIENT CFD SIMULATION OF THE FLOW IN A TEST RIG OF AN AEROENGINE BEARING CHAMBER

In this paper, we present results for the application of an Eulerian-Lagrangian technique to the transient simulation of an oil film formation on the walls of an aeroengine bearing chamber. The flow of oil in an aeroengine bearing chamber consists of high speed oil droplets interacting with the bearing structures and flowing oil film. The situation in the chamber is highly rotational and consisting of sheared flow of air over oil. The bearing chamber may also be located in the vicinity of the combustion chamber. The oil provides lubrication and cooling of the hot structures. Modelling the flow in the bearing chamber is therefore complex. The Volume of Fluid (VoF) technique offers a potential platform to model droplet-film interaction; however, it requires fine mesh details to capture the flow to the droplet level. Such detailed resolution would not be practical for the complete chamber geometry because of the prohibitively expensive computational overhead requirements. A Lagrangian formulation is therefore proposed to represent the droplets as source terms in the Navier-Stokes equation while the film is represented using VoF. This effectively reduces the need to resolve the droplets explicitly. The predicted film formation pattern compares with experimental results.