A novel bearing lubricating device based on the piezoelectric micro-jet

A novel bearing lubricating device, which is embedded in gyroscope's bearing systemand based on the theory of the piezoelectric micro-jet, was designed for this study. The embeddedstructure of a bearing lubricating system can make effective use of the limited space of bearing systemswithout increasing the whole mass of the system. The drop-on-demand (DOD) lubrication can berealized by the piezoelectric micro-jet system to implement the long acting lubrication of the bearingsystem. A mathematical model of inlet boundary conditions was established to carry on the numericalsimulation based on CFD. The motion states of the droplets with different voltage excitations wereanalyzed via numerical simulations, and the injection performances of the piezoelectric micro-jetlubricating device were tested in accordance with past experiments. The influences of differentparameters of voltage excitation on injection performance were obtained, and the methods of adjustingthe injection performance to meet different requirements are given according to the analyses of theresults. The mathematical model and numerical simulation method were confirmed by comparingthe results of past simulations and experiments.