A New Approach for Studying Cavitation in Lubrication

The underlying theory, in this paper, is based on clear physical arguments related to conservation of mass flow and considers both incompressible and compressible fluids. The result of the mathematical modeling is a system of equations with two unknowns, which are related to the hydrodynamic pressure and the degree of saturation of the fluid. Discretization of the system leads to a linear complementarity problem (LCP), which easily can be solved numerically with readily available standard methods and an implementation of a model problem in MATLAB code is made available for the reader of the paper. The model and the associated numerical solution method have significant advantages over today's most frequently used cavitation algorithms, which are based on Elrod-Adams pioneering work.