Lubrication properties of Nitinol 60 alloy used as high-speed rolling bearing and numerical simulation of flow pattern of oil-air lubrication

The friction and wear tests were performed using Nitinol 60 alloy pin sliding over GCr15 steel disk in a pin-on-disk tribometer system under PAO oil lubrication conditions. It was found that Nitinol 60 alloy can be lubricated well and has shown remarkable tribological performance. Average coefficient of friction (COF) of Nitinol 60 is 0.6 under dry friction; however, average COF decreases to 0.1 under PAO oil lubrication. SEM image of the worn surface shows that Nitinol 60 exhibits excellent wear resistance and the wear mechanism is mainly adhesive wear. Flow pattern of oil-air flow in oil pipe was simulated by FLUENT software with VOF model for acquiring working performance of oil-air lubrication. The optimum velocity of oil and air at the inlet was achieved, which provides the great proposal for the design of experiment of oil-air lubrication of Nitinol 60 alloy. The simulation results showed that the optimum annular flow of flow pattern was obtained when air velocity is 10 m/s and oil velocity is 0.05 m/s. The formation mechanism of annular flow was also discussed in the present study.