Effect of Operating Parameters on the Tribological Characteristics of 3D Printed Textured Journal Bearings

In this paper, the 3D printed textured journal bearings are fabricated by the fused deposition modelling (FDM) with the nylon polymer. To develop it, the Ultimaker 2+ 3D printer is used. For this study, the process parameters such as texture depth (TD), rotor speed (N) and load (P) are considered variable parameters. To design and analyze these variable factors, the response surface methodology (RSM) technique is used. The tribological characteristics of 3D printed journal bearings such as wear rate and rubbing temperature are considered as the output parameters that are obtained by the experimental study. From this results, it is observed that the wear rate of texture journal bearings is firstly increase and then decrease with the texture depth. Whereas, its wear rate with the speed and load are increasing significantly. The rubbing temperature of texture journal bearings is exponentially increase with the load.