EHL Experimental Techniques and Experimental-Numerical Result Comparisons

The development of elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) theories and simulation models requires experimental validation techniques. This paper reviews EHL experimental techniques based on capacitance, electric conductivity and contact resistance, discharge voltage, X-ray transmission, R-C oscillation technique, and optical interferometry, and experimental measurements of EHL film thickness. A few trends of film thickness variation with speed at low speed and thin-film lubrication are observed. The numerical results of an EHL model are compared with various experimental results. These experiments are from two thin-film smooth experiments under pure rolling and one multi ridge experiment with different slide-to-roll ratio. Most of these numerical and experimental results are in good agreement.