Lubrication With Binary Mixtures: Liquid-Liquid Emulsion in an EHL Conjunction

Abstract

Oil-in-water and water-in-oil emulsions are often employed as lubricants. In many applications of emulsion lubricants both the deformation of the bounding solid surfaces and the pressure dependence of the viscosity of the lubricant contribute essentially to performance, thus defining lubrication in the elastohydrodynamic (EHD) mode. In this paper we investigate lubrication with liquid-liquid binary mixtures of two Newtonian fluids in an EHD conjunction, and discuss the effect of varying the parameters of the problem on pressure, film thickness and volume fraction distribution. The basic theory of lubrication with liquid-liquid mixtures is contained in an earlier publication (Al-Sharif et al., 1992), here we use the theory to study an important application.