Abstract:
Nepenthes alata is a carnivorous plant that is found in the tropics, which is known to feed on insects on a daily basis for its own nourishment. The surface structure of the wax area of the Nepenthes alata has super-lubrication properties, which can make it extremely difficult for insects to climb out of the bottle, and even inadvertently slip into the bottle of the Nepenthes alata and turn into nutrients for it. The structure of the wax area not only enables the inner surfaces to remain moist for long periods of time (i.e., storing mucus), but also serves to reduce friction on the surface of contact. For improving the lubrication properties between the contact surfaces, based on the structure of the wax area of Nepenthes alata, bionic texture composed of cylindrical and lunar composite was designed, and the oil film pressure and load-bearing capacity were taken as the performance indexes. Based on Fluent software, the influence of the depth of the texture unit on the load-bearing performance of the oil film was analyzed, and further compared with the traditional forms of the texture, and the reason for the superior lubrication of the texture of Nepenthes alata compared with traditional textures was further explored through the flow velocity diagrams. On this basis, the influence of the arrangement of the bionic texture on the oil film load-bearing performance was analyzed, and the bionic texture with excellent load-bearing performance was obtained in the end. The results showed that the bionic texture had the effect of decreasing the friction of the contact surfaces due to its oil storage and lubrication function. Through the FEM, it was found that when the fluid flows through, a part of the fluid goes into the gaps and stayed there for a period of time, which caused an increase in the pressure of the oil film, which was the reason why the load-bearing and lubrication capacity rises. Cavitation effects had a significant impact since the oil film goes through a process of breakup and re-formation when the fluid passes through the texture, in which the pressure distribution of the oil film was not homogeneous and there were both positive and negative pressure zones present within a texture cell. Positive pressure zones generated an upward load-bearing force on the oil film, and vice versa. When the positive pressure area was relatively large, it could produce a higher positive load-bearing force, at which time it could be considered to be an increase in load capacity. The results were more consistent when cavitation effect was taken into consideration. The composite wax area texture had a superior lubrication performance when compared with the traditional texture, the gaps between the textures interacted with each other as the fluid flows through it causing the fluid to stay inside the texture for a longer period of time, which means that it was easier to generate localized high pressure and higher load carrying capacity. The primary reason was that it was influenced by the countercurrent effect. Therefore, the optimal lubrication depth exists, and the better lubrication performance was obtained when the dimensionless depth was 0.8. Among the eight kinds of arrangement, the uniform arrangement with the lunar facing to the inlet flow had the best lubrication performance. In the comparison results of the arrangement, the uniform arrangement had a significant advantage over the staggered arrangement in terms of load carrying capacity. This was explained by the fact that the uniform arrangement was more prone to interactions between the textures, whereas the staggered arrangement weakens this effect and reduced the inertia effect.