Oil-Jet Lubrication of Epicyclic Gear Trains

Predicting and understanding the evolving oil distribution is the major key for the design of efficient and reliable cooling and lubrication systems in gear boxes. The complexity of multiple rotating and moving parts and the bad accessibility necessitate costly and complicated experimental approaches. Suitable numerical simulation methods promise to overcome the given experimental limitations.
In this work the oil-jet lubrication in an epicyclic gear train with fixed carrier frame and a transmission ratio of 1 : 2.95 is investigated. From a modelling perspective the main challenges are in the heavily deforming computational domains, accurate and sharp representation of the oil surface, high temporal and spatial resolutions and computational efficiency on parallel architectures. Hence, a single phase ”free surface” Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics approach was chosen as the most suitable. The study is conducted for two different positions of the nozzle. To capture three-dimensional effects of the oil flow, the simulations were setup in 3D. The resulting oil distributions are presented and phenomenologically discussed. Especially the influence of different nozzle positions on the oil distribution near the gear meshing is compared and highlighted.