Mixed EHL Lubrication There are situations where both boundary lubrication and full film lubrication play

an important role in the overall lubrication of the contacting bodies. The lubrication regime between boundary and elastohydrodynamic lubrication is termed as partial EHL or mixed EHL. Partial EHL deals with the simultaneously occurring solid to solid contact and elastohydrodynamic lubricated contact. It is generally believed that if the average film thickness is less than three times the composite surface roughness, the surface asperities will force direct solid to solid contact, resulting in mixed-EHL. A dimensionless film parameter is defined to distinguish the lubrication regimes possible for rough surfaces lubrication: hmin = (17) 2 2 Rq , a + Rq ,b where hmin is the minimum lubricant film thickness, Rq,a and Rq,b are the root mean square surface finish of contacting bodies respectively. The lubrication regimes are characterized as: - hydrodynamic lubrication 5 < 100 3 < 10 - elastohydrodynamic lubrication - partial or mixed lubrication 1 < 5 - boundary lubrication <1 The average film thickness in a partial lubrication is between 0.01m and 0.1m. Because of the partial load support by the bulk lubricant film, the coefficient of friction of mixed lubrication is usually less than 0.1. Previous studies on rough surface EHL mainly focused on the contact with continuous EHL flow. Cheng and Dyson (1978) and Patir and Cheng (1978) investigated stochastically the effects of surface roughness in EHL contacts. Patir and Cheng (1978) modified the Reynolds equation with flow factor parameters along and across the rolling directions to handle the effects of surface roughness of any arbitrary surface pattern. Their approach served as the foundation for EHL of rough surfaces until more robust models for EHL were developed. Sadeghi (1991) investigated the effects of fluid models and surface roughness on EHL of rough surfaces. Greenwood and Morales-Espejel (1994) and Morales-Espejel (1996) investigated the effects of transverse roughness and kinematics of roughness in EHL. Venner and Lubrecht (1994) investigated the influence of a transverse ridge on the film thickness in a circular EHL contact under rolling/sliding conditions, assuming Newtonian, isothermal lubricant. Xu and Sadeghi (1996) investigated the EHL of circular contacts with measured surface roughness and thermal effects. These studies demonstrated that surface features generally affect the lubricant film thickness and pressure distributions as compared to the smooth surface results. Experimentally, optical interferometry has been used by Kaneta et al. (1992, 1993) to demonstrate the effects of bumps on EHL circular contacts. Under low surface velocity conditions, their results showed zero film thickness for a series of bumps, which suggested that direct solid to solid contact, occurs in EHL with non-smooth surfaces. The developments of numerical simulation techniques together with the advancements of computer hardware enabled tribology researchers to investigate more complicated lubrication problems including mixed EHL. The attention therefore shifted from the steady-state, smooth surface, isothermal and Newtonian EHL solutions to more realistic transient, rough surface, thermal and non-Newtonian EHL solutions. The challenge of dealing with the direct solid to solid contact in an elastohydrodynamic contact and its deterministic numerical solution was only

met in the past decade. To study such an EHL problem when surface features protrude through the lubricant film, a mixed contact model is needed. Jiang et al. (1999) presented a deterministic mixed contact models and investigated solid to solid contact of surface asperities or features as they moved through an EHL contact region. In their models, the solid contact pressure was calculated using inverse FFT method. More recently, Wang et al. (2004) used a macro-micro model to study mixed EHL, which superimposed off-line asperity contact pressure calculation on to the elastohydrodynamic pressure determination from the average flow model developed by Patir and Cheng (1978). Hu et al. (1999) developed a deterministic mixed EHL model. Figure 9 depicts the pressure and film thickness distribution for a mixed EHL contact. The pressure distribution along the center of contact in the rolling direction is also shown. The results show that the pressure undergoes large fluctuations where there is surface asperity contact. The orthogonal shear stress along the center line of contact in the rolling direction is also shown to demonstrate the effect of surface asperities on internal stresses. For lower average film thickness (ha/Rq<1) due to more severe surface asperity interaction, the solution for the asperity dry contact is suggested to provide the upper boundary for the pressure distribution. Recent developments in mixed EHL lubrication include the determination of flash temperatures and the effects of surface roughness on fatigue life predictions (Deolalikar and Sadeghi, 2007a, 2007b). Their results, as shown in Figure 10 for a pure sliding condition, indicated the life reduction due to the surface roughness. They show that when the equivalent rms of contacting surfaces is below 0.2 the relative life increases and therefore, surface roughness has little influence on fatigue of machine elements. In a more general sense, mixed EHL contact could also occur for smooth surfaces. Hu et al (1999) and Hu and Zhu (2000) presented full numerical solutions to the mixed contact problems and studied smooth surface EHL with low rolling speeds, which enables lubricated contact and solid contact to happen at the same time. Mixed EHL also occurs during the start up condition of the normal EHL operations. During the start up condition, the contact starts as a direct solid-to-solid Hertzian contact as the surfaces are at rest under the applied load. As the surfaces start to move, the lubricant film in the inlet starts to build up through the contact area, breaking apart the two contacting surfaces. Finally a full EHL lubricant film completely separates the contacting surfaces. This phenomenon was investigated by Zhao et al. (2001a) using a mixed lubrication contact model that uses the multigrid multilevel method to solve the lubricated contact and a minimization of complementary energy approach to solve the solid contact. The FFT method was incorporated to increase the efficiency of computing the film thickness. Holmes et al. (2002) also used their numerical model using a new coupled differential deflection method to study the start-up condition. Glovnea and Spikes (2001) published their experimental results of steel ball on glass disc contact under start up conditions with controlled acceleration. The numerical and experimental results demonstrate that for hard EHL (PH > 0.5GPa), the lubricant film propagates through the contact area with the mean surface velocity. It is consistent with the analysis of the Reynolds equation that for heavily loaded contacts, the high pressure causes the pressure terms in the Reynolds equation to vanish and it simply becomes: h h um + =0 (18) x t For most lubricants, the effect of compressibility is minimal and can be neglected. Thus the solution to the above equation is: h h(x-umt), which demonstrates that the film profile moves to the right with a velocity of um. The overall film thickness propagation for the start up process is shown in Figure 11 for the experimental results (Glovenea and Spikes, 2001), together with the

analytical and numerical results. Figure 12 depicts the film thickness and pressure distributions at the beginning, an intermediate, and the final instants during the start up process. The solid and lubricated contact regions can be clearly visualized during the EHL start up process. The start up time, defined as the time in which both the solid contact and the lubricated contact are simultaneously occurring, can simply be determined for a linear acceleration (constant acceleration rate) start up as: 4b , if u M 4ab (19) ts = a 2b u M , if u M < 4ab + u M 2a This parameter can be used in estimating how long the EHL contact is in the critical condition as the friction in direct solid to solid contact is larger than the fully lubricated EHL contact. The flash temperature rise due to the friction during this start process for dry contact surfaces (without a protective boundary film) is studied by Zhao et al (2001b). Their results indicated that the surfaces can experience a temperature rise of nearly 600K for a slide to roll ratio of 0.2. As described in this section, mixed-EHL study up to this point focused on building the models and generating solutions for individual EHL running conditions with specific surface roughness profiles. The results are more application specific, rather than being generally applicable to machine component design process. It is believed that, as more and more mixed-EHL solutions are developed, general empirical relationships (similar to the ones developed by Hamrock and Dowson, 1976b, for isothermal smooth EHL) will be developed in the near future for the film thickness and pressure in mixed-EHL as the functions of the running conditions and the characteristic parameters of the surface roughness.