Variational bounds applied to unstationary hydrodynamic lubrication

This paper is devoted to the effects of surface roughness in hydrodynamic lubrication. The numerical analysis of such problems requires a very fine mesh to resolve the surface roughness, hence it is often necessary to do some type of averaging. Previously, homogenization (a rigorous form of averaging) has been successfully applied to Reynolds type differential equations. More recently, the idea of finding upper and lower bounds on the effective behavior, obtained by homogenization, was applied for the first time in tribology. In these pioneering works, it has been assumed that only one surface is rough. In this paper we develop these results to include the unstationary case where both surfaces may be rough. More precisely, we first use multiple-scale expansion to obtain a homogenization result for a class of variational problems including the variational formulation associated with the unstationary Reynolds equation. Thereafter, we derive lower and upper bounds corresponding to the homogenized (averaged) variational problem. The bounds reduce the numerical analysis, in that one only needs to solve two smooth problems, i.e. no local scale has to be considered. Finally, we present several examples, where it is shown that the bounds can be used to estimate the effects of surface roughness with very high accuracy.