A Study of Thermal EHL Behaviours under Orthogonal Entrainment and Sliding

Under EHL contacts in practical engineering, the velocities of the two solid surfaces are not always along the same direction, and the entrainment and the sliding become orthogonal when the surface velocities are of the same magnitude. For such situations a thermal EHL model was presented, and full numerical solutions were given. The film thickness and profiles were obtained at different angles between the two surface velocities. The results show that with increasing angles between the two surface velocities the central film thickness increased and the minimum film thickness decreased firstly and then increased. The film thickness variations can be attributed to the synergetic effect by the geometric wedge and the thermal viscosity wedge, which can also be used to explain the recent results by Hoehn et al.