@article{Català2025, 
author = {Pau Català and Vallbé-Mumbrú Marc and Francesc Pérez-Ràfols},
title = {Roughness induced variation as a new mechanism for hydrodynamic lubrication between parallel surfaces},
year = {2025},
journal = {Friction},
volume = {13},
number = {4},
pages = {9441015},
keywords = {surface roughness, hydrodynamic lubrication, mechanical face seals, stochastic two-scale analysis},
url = {https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/FRICT.2025.9441015},
doi = {10.26599/FRICT.2025.9441015},
abstract = {This work proposes a new lift mechanism capable of explaining the hydrodynamic lift observed in real mechanical face seals with parallel surfaces. While it is well established that roughness is a key factor inducing such lift, its effect is commonly explained in the form of micro-wedges and asperity-level cavitation. The novelty of this work is to consider roughness induced random variability in the flow restriction, which induces effective wedges. First, a dedicated stochastic two-scale model is developed and used to demonstrate the proposed new mechanism in a case study. We demonstrate that the described new mechanism acts at scales comparable to the macroscopic size of the seal, much larger than the commonly considered micro-wedges. Afterwards, the limitations for this new proposed mechanism are discussed.}
}