Notation b Half-width Hertzian contact

Abstract

This paper presents a new numerical method to solve transient line contact elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) problems. A high-order Discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is used for the spatial discretization and the stan-dard Crank-Nicolson method is employed to approximate the time derivative. An h-adaptivity method is used for grid adaptation with the time-stepping, and the penalty method is employed to handle the cavitation condition. The roughness model employed here is a simple indentation which is located on the upper surface. Numerical results are presented comparing the Discontinuous Galerkin method to standard finite difference techniques. It is shown that micro-EHL features are cap-tured with far fewer degrees of freedom than when using low-order finite difference methods