Performance of textured foil journal bearing considering the influence of relative texture depth

Both foil structure and surface texturing have been widely used to improve bearing performance. However, there is little research on their combination, namely, textured gas foil bearing. This paper adopts the Reynolds equation as the pressure governing equation of bump-type foil journal bearing to study the influence of textures located on the top foil. The Newton-Raphson iterative method and the perturbation method are employed to obtain static and dynamic characteristics, respectively. Thereafter, based on three texture distribution types, further analysis about the effect of the relative texture depth and the textured portion is carried out. The results indicate that an appropriate arrangement of textures could improve the performance of gas foil bearing. For #1 texture distribution, the maximum increment of load capacity could exceed 10% when ω = 1.4 × 10⁵ r/min, ε = 0.2.