Theoretical study of effect of the geometrical parameters on the dynamic properties of the elastic rings of an air journal bearing

The paper investigates theoretically the effect of the geometry of the elastic rings of an air journal bearing on the elastic rings dynamic coefficients. The physical finite element method (FEM) model used to obtain the dynamic coefficients of the rings is discussed. A theoretical model is implemented to predict the effect of the geometrical parameters on the dynamic coefficients of the elastic rings. The effect of the geometrical parameters on the dynamic coefficients at different frequencies is studied using FEM. The elastic geometry that result in desired dynamic coefficients is demonstrated. Since predicting the dynamic coefficients for all possible ring geometries using FEM would be computationally expensive. A neural network (NN) is trained to predict the dynamic coefficients for all possible ring geometries generated by the different ring geometrical parameters within a given input domain. The NN results are compared to the experimentally verified FEM results and the results are in good agreement.