Computational PDEs Unit: EHL project

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EHL ROPA Project

An Adaptive Parallel Problem Solving Environment for Transient EHL Problems

Researcher Dr. Christopher E. Goodyer

Principal Investigator Professor Martin Berzins

Funded by EPSRC Grant GR/N23585/01

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Background and Context

Elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) is a challenging engineering problem. See the companion page for an introduction. EHL occurs in journal bearings and gears, where, in the presence of a lubricant, at the point of contact there is a very large pressure exerted on a very small area, often up to 3 GPa. This causes the shape of the contacting surfaces to deform and flatten out at the centre of the contact. Under certain circumstances the lubricant may attain the consistency of glass. The motivation for this study is to help select the appropriate lubricants for a component to reduce running costs and environmental impact by overcoming friction in the engine. Obtaining reliable solutions quickly is therefore important. With this in mind the specific aims of the project were:

To construct a prototype data flow problem solving environment (PSE) for transient EHL problems.

To develop and incorporate novel parallel adaptive multigrid algorithms into the PSE.

To analyse the transient aspects of EHL problems and develop new transient solvers.

Given the increasing importance of grid-based approaches the last objective was de-emphasised and a further objective added:

To investigate the development of a Grid-enabled PSE for transient EHL problems

Summary of the Project and Its Achievements

The project has achieved significant progress in developing new algorithmic and problem solving environment approaches for solving elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) problems. The main achievements of the project are:

To develop adaptive mesh approaches to spatial mesh refinement and timestepping for EHL problems.

To develop a working portable parallel EHL code and to demonstrate its performance.

To create two different Problem Solving Environments (PSEs) for solving EHL problems based upon both the IRIS Explorer and SCIRun systems and to compare these systems.

To extend the PSE to be Grid-enabled in a prototype form, thus enabling remote use by industrial users in the future.

These results are documented in a number of publications given below, this web page and a follow-on e-science project with Shell Global Solutions, funded by EPSRC grant GR/S/19486/01

Publications

  • Goodyer C.E., Fairlie R., Berzins M. and Scales L.E. Adaptive techniques for elastohydrodynamic lubrication solvers. Tribology Research : From Model Experiment to Industrial Problem, Proceedings of the 27th Leeds-Lyon Symposium on Tribology. Elsevier, 2001.

  • Goodyer, C. E. and Fairlie, R. and Berzins, M. and A Scales, L. E., Adaptive Mesh Methods for Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication, ECCOMAS CFD, Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, ISBN 0-905-091-12-4, 2001

  • Goodyer, C. E. and Berzins, M., Eclipse and Ellipse: PSEs for EHL Solutions using IRIS Explorer and SCIRun, Proceedings of ICCS '02, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2329 pp 523-532, Springer, 2002

  • Goodyer, C. E. and Wood, J. and Berzins, M., A Parallel Grid Based PSE for EHL Problems, Proceedings of PARA '02, Espoo, Finland, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2367 pp 521--530, Springer, 2002

  • Fairlie R., Goodyer, C. E., Berzins M. and Scales L.E. Numerical Modelling of Thermal Effects in Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication Solvers to be included in : Tribological Research and Design for Engineering Systems : Proceedings of the 29th Leeds-Lyon Symposium on Tribology., Elsevier

    A number of other papers are in preparation, the first two of which are:
  • Brodlie K.W. Goodyer, C. E. Walkley M.A. and Wood, J. Grid-enabled collaborative computational steering for elastohydrodynamic lubrication problems. In preparation for submission to Computing and Visualization in Science.

  • Goodyer, C. E. and Berzins, M., Efficient Parallelisation of a multilevel elastohydrodynamic lubrication solver. In preparation for submission to Concurrency.

    A complete list of our EHL publications is also available. Web links to downloadable versions of most of the papers are provided.

    Seminars

    The following sets of seminar slides provide a good overview of our research. A seminar on our EHL work was given by Professor Martin Berzins at Bradford University and is available for download in pdf form here.

    An invited talk at the IMACS Workshop of the Adaptive solution of PDEs at The Fields Institute and is available for download in pdf format here.

    A presentation of our EHL work was also given to Mr Phillip Watts CEO of Shell and is available for download in pdf format here.

    The two movies shown as part of the last two presentations are shown here the first shows the SCIRun-based EHL Problem Solving Environment being used for computational steering and is available for download in mpeg format here. The second shows the pressure distribution (bottom) for a rough surface (top) and in animated gif format here.

    Thanks

    To Dr Roger Fairlie and Mr Dan Hart of The CPDE Unit and to Professor Laurence Scales of Shell Global Solutions.

    Funding

    This work has been funded by an EPSRC ROPA grant GR/N23585/01

    Future Work

    We have also started to do work with real rough surfaces.

    Last Modified: 11th December 2002

    Contact Chris Goodyer : ceg@comp.leeds.ac.uk or Martin Berzins: martin@comp.leeds.ac.uk