Evaluation of a volume of fluid CFD methodology for the oil film thickness estimation in an aero engine bearing chamber
The presented work aims to identify a Volume of Fluid (VOF) CFD approach for the transient simulation of air/oil flows inside an aero engine bearing chamber. Typically VOF requires relatively fine grids and consequently small time steps to sufficiently resolve the formation of oil films and their interaction with air flows. The need to achieve a stationary state which requires flow times on the order of seconds makes the compromise between simulation accuracy and simulation times a challenging choice when using the VOF method. In this work, the use of the Compressive Interface Reconstruction scheme with bounded second order implicit time discretization has enabled a significant speed up of the simulation times against the previously adopted explicit Geometric Reconstruction scheme. The results are evaluated against experimental data available in the literature.