Lubrication Regimes Simulation Software

 Dear sirs, find attached this post by Lorenzo Asín, Mechanical Engineer, about his Undergraduate Project related to develop a Simulation Software of the Lubrication Regimes. You can know more about this project in this web.

Nowadays it is important to have precise control of the lubrication regimes in order to reduce costs (either reparations or an excessive energy consumption due to the usage of more lubricant than necessary) and to improve the useful life of mechanic components.

 This software has been developed with the idea of allowing the designers to obtain a clear and concise idea about the lubricants behavior under the variation of the most important parameters that take part during lubrication.

 In this software, created trough the MATLAB^TM programming language, the user can choose between a variety of different mechanical elements to simulate the lubrication in. These elements can be bearings (ball, cylindrical and spherical rollers), gears (parallel axis helical, spur, bevel and planetary gears) and cam-follower systems (sliding and roller systems). If the user knows it has also the option to introduce the contact area manually.

 A great database of mineral and synthetic lubricants of different trademarks (Repsol, Shell, Cepsa, bp and Exxon Mobil) has been added in order to facilitate the user the selection and comparison of different products. The manual introduction of the lubricant characteristics are also included, in case that the lubricant is not included in the database.

 Other data, as the surface of the mechanical element roughness, the mechanical elements materials or the speed and loads that these mechanisms suffer will be necessary to do a correct simulation.

 The software will execute a simulation obtaining the lubricant film thickness for the given parameters. Comparing these thicknesses with the surface roughness, the software will be able to determine the kind of lubrication regime that it is taking place (boundary, mixed or elastohydrodynamic) and to inform the user about it.

 The user can also choose between various graphic representations to observe the lubricant film thickness change as a function of the variation of the three main parameters that take part in lubrication: the relative speed, load, and temperature. The user will be able to use 2D (graphs relating one of the parameters with the thickness) and 3D graphs (relating two of the parameters with the thickness).

 For subsequent analysis of the results the user also will be able to save the generated graphs as images and to export the simulation data to an Excel file.

 This is a user-friendly software that allows the obtaining a great amount of data about lubrication and gives a potential save money and time for the user.