AUTOMATED OPTIMAL DESIGN OF EXTERNALLY PRESSURISED OIL•LUBRICATED JOURNAL BEARINGS WITH COMPETING ACTIVES

Abstract

The capability of an externally pressur.ised:,bearing (EPB) in having a high stiffness, a high load carrying capacity, a low power loss and good damping characterstics makes it a choice bearing in many engineering applications. In the design of such bearings-, the designer often wants to have the best of these characterstic features. The bearing characterstics are indeed of competitive nature and getting an optimally designed bearing through parametric studies is a highly tedious and at times an unattainable task. EPB design should infact be looked upon as a multi-objective. optimisation problem and this work is an attempt in that direction.Various multi-objective formulations, suitable for competing objectives of high load capacity, low power loss and high static stiffness have been discussed and applied to a typical design problem. The bounded objective function method seems to be better suited to the designer who can specify feasible bounds on all but one of the competing objectives.