A Highly Accurate Approach That Resolves the Pressure Spike of Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication

Abstract

We propose an accurate numerical method to solve the classical line contact problem of elastohydrodynamic lubrication. The method incorporates a second order accurate discretization and a straightforward automatic local mesh refinement procedure. Using these elements, we remove discretization errors which have produced significant inaccuracies in previously published results, and we completely resolve the pressure spike which is shown to be smooth on a sufficiently small length scale.