A transient thermal model for mixed-film contacts

A thermal model is presented in this paper for deterministic calculations of the contact temperatures in mixed-film lubrication. A first-principal approach is taken to obtain the temperature results by solving transient energy equations in a domain consisting of three solid-film-solid regions. Various modeling techniques are used to feature model simplicity and to achieve a proper balance among solution accuracy, model robustness and computational efficiency. This thermal model may be incorporated into other deterministic isothermal mixed-film models to form a complete base model for mixed-film lubrication. It provides a platform upon which to model other effects such as lubricant additives, asperity plastic deformation and surface coating.