Numerical simulation and experimental research on passive hydrodynamic bearing in a blood pump

The current research of hydrodynamic bearing in blood pump mainly focuses on the bearing structure design. Compared with the typical plane slider bearing and Rayleigh step bearing, spiral groove bearing has excellent performance in load-carrying capacity. However, the load-carrying capacity would decrease significantly with increasing flow rate in conventional designs. In this paper, the special treatment is made to the upper spiral groove bearing to make sure that both the circulatory flowing and load-carrying capacity are high. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics(CFD) models in the space between rotor and shaft are developed by using FLUENT software. Effects of groove number, film height and groove depth on load-carrying capacity of the spiral groove bearings are investigated by orthogonal experiment design. The experimental results show that film height is the most remarkable factor to the load-carrying capacity. The variation tendency of load-carrying capacity reveals that the best combination of geometry is the one with groove number of 8, film height 0.03 mm and groove depth 0.08 mm. The velocity and pressure distributions in spiral groove bearings are also analyzed, and the analysis result shows that the distributions are in conformity with the design of the blood pump based on the principle of hydrodynamic bearing. The displacement of the rotor with the best combination parameters is tested by using laser displacement sensors, the testing result shows that the suspending performance is satisfactory both in axial and radial directions. This research proposes a bearing design method which has sufficient load-carrying capacity to support rotor as an effective passive hydrodynamic bearing.