Impact of the thermal effect on the load-carrying capacity of a slipper pair for an aviation axial-piston pump

A thermal hydraulic model based on the lumped parameter method is presented to analyze the load-carrying capacity of a slipper pair in an aviation axial-piston pump under specified operating conditions. Both theoretical and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity of the thermal hydraulic model. The results illustrate that the squeezing force and thermal wedge bearing force are the main factors that affect the film thickness and load-carrying capacity. At high oil temperature and high load pressure, the film thickness decreases with increasing clamping force due to a combined action of the squeezing bearing force and the thermal wedge bearing force, but the load-carrying capacity will increase. An increase of the film thickness is proven to be beneficial under high shaft rotational speed but especially dangerous as it strongly increases the ripple amplitude of the film thickness, which leads to decreasing the load-carrying capacity. The structural parameters of the slipper can be optimized to achieve desired performance, such as the slipper radius ratio and orifice length diameter ratio. To satisfy the requirement of the load-carrying capacity, the slipper radius ratio should be selected from 1.4 to 1.8, and the orifice length diameter ratio should be selected from 4 to 5.