Industrial Bearing Contacts

Bearings are used in industry whenever velocity accommodation is needed to coincide with some form of friction and wear reduction. The contacting surfaces can take on a wide variety of different geometries from conformal sliders to point and line rolling elements. Despite their wide usage, bearing design suffers from the inherent difficulties in modeling and optimizing bearing interfaces subjected to complex friction and wear phenomena.

The PFTL currently performs experiments and modeling focused on studying lubrication phenomena in next generation bearings which employ innovative techniques such as thin film coatings, solid lubricant additives, and surface texturing. This is with the goal of designing computational frameworks with high-fidelity physics.