Effect of Longitudinal Roughness on Magnetic Fluid Based Squeeze Film between Truncated Conical Plates

An attempt has been made to study and analyze the performance of a magnetic fluid based squeeze film between rough truncated conical plates. The lubricant used here is a magnetic fluid and the external magnetic field is oblique to the lower plate. The bearing surfaces are assumed to be longitudinally rough. The roughness of the bearing surfaces is modeled by a stochastic random variable with nonzero mean, variance and skewness. Efforts have been made to average the associated Reynolds equation with respect to the random roughness parame- ter. The concerned non-dimensional equation is solved with appropriate boundary conditions in dimensionless form to obtain the pressure distribution. This is then used to get the expression for load carrying capacity, resulting in the calculation of response time. The results are presented graphically. It is observed that the bearing system registers an improved performance as compared to that of a bearing system dealing with a conventional lubricant. The results indicate that the pressure, load carrying capacity and response time increase with increasing magnetization param- eter. This investigation reveals that the standard deviation induces a positive effect (unlike the case of transverse roughness). Besides, negatively skewed roughness increases the load carrying capacity and this performance further enhances espe- cially when negative variance is involved. Although, aspect ratio and semi-vertical angle tend to decrease the load carrying capacity, there is a scope for obtaining better performance in the case of negatively skewed roughness.