A Numerical Study on Influence of Temperature on Lubricant Film Characteristics of the Piston/Cylinder Interface in Axial Piston Pumps

Yueheng Song, Jiming Ma and Shengkui Zeng
Additional contact information
Yueheng Song: School of Reliability and System Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Jiming Ma: Sino-French Engineering School, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Shengkui Zeng: School of Reliability and System Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-16

Abstract: The loss of kinetic energy of moving parts due to viscous friction of lubricant causes the reduction of piston pump efficiency. The viscosity of lubricant film is mainly affected by the thermal effect. In order to improve energy efficiency of piston pump, this research presents a numerical method to analyze the lubricant film characteristics in axial piston pumps, considering the thermal effect by the coupled multi-disciplinary model, which includes the fluid flow field expressed by Reynolds equation, temperature field expressed by energy equation and heat transfer equation, kinematics expressed by the motion equation. The velocity and temperature distributions of the gap flow of piston/cylinder interface in steady state are firstly numerically computed. Then the distributions are validated by the experiment. Finally, by changing the thermal boundary condition, the influence of thermal effect on the lubricant film, the eccentricity and the contact time between the piston and cylinder are analyzed. Results show that with the increase of temperature, the contact time increases in the form of a hyperbolic tangent function, which will reduce the efficiency of the axial piston pump. There is a critical temperature beyond which the contact time will increase rapidly, thus this temperature is the considered as a key point for the temperature design.

Keywords: thermodynamic; numerical simulation; thermal effect; axial piston pumps (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/7/1842/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/7/1842/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:7:p:1842-:d:157880

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().