Influence of surface texture shape, geometry and orientation on hydrodynamic lubrication performance of plane‐to‐plane slider surfaces

Abstract This paper investigates the effect of surface texturing on the tribological performance of hydrodynamic slider surfaces. The geometric parameters of the texture considered were the texture shape, bottom profile, orientation and depth. A theoretical model based on the steady‐state Reynolds equation was solved numerically by finite difference method to analyse the effect of surface texturing. The optimum geometry of each texture shape was determined, for which, the film thickness was maximised and the friction coefficient was minimised. Among all the shapes, the square with a single wedge bottom profile outperformed. The performance of the triangle, the chevron and the ellipse was highly influenced by their orientation with respect to the sliding direction. Texture density was found to be more dominant in impacting the tribological performance than the texture aspect ratio. The results obtained were further discussed with respect to the studies available in literature to emphasise the significance of the findings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.