Study on the Durability of Composite Tilting Pad Journal Bearing for Turbo Compressor System under Oil-cut Situation

The tilting pad journal bearing for the turbo compressor application has a role to support high speed and heavy loading rotor. White metal has been widely used for the bearing material but the conventional bearing is immediately suspended and induces serious serious damage to the rotor under the unexpected oil cut situation or the insufficient oil film formation. The carbon fiber reinforced composite having high specific stiffness, specific strength and excellent tribological characteristics can solve these seizure problems. In this work, the study on the durability of high thermal resistance carbon fiber/epoxy composite tilting pad journal bearing under oil cut situation was conducted. The material properties of the composite materials including tensile, compressive and interlaminar properties were measured at room and high temperature of oil cut situation. To investigate the possibility of failure of composite tilting pad journal bearing under oil cut situation, the stress distribution of the composite bearing was analyzed via finite element analysis and the Tsai-Wu Failure index was calculated. To verify the failure analysis results, the oil cut tests for the composite tilting pad journal bearing were conducted using industrial test bench.