History of Gas Lubrication

Meanwhile, study on ultra-thin film gas lubrication problems has become one of the most attractive subjects in the held of tribology during the past three decades. 

Historically, gas lubrication theory was developed from the classical liquid lubrication equation—Re5molds equation [4]. The first gas lubrication equation was derived by Harrison [5] in 1913, taking the compressibility of gases into account. Because the classical gas lubrication equation is based on the Navier-Stokes equation, it does not incorporate some gas flow characteristics rooted in the rarefaction effects of dilute gases. As early as 1959, Brunner s experiment [6] showed that the classical gas lubrication equation was 

Since the middle of the 1990s, another computation method, direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC), has been employed in analysis of ultra-thin film gas lubrication problems [13-15]. DSMC is a particle-based simulation scheme suitable to treat rarefied gas flow problems. It was introduced by Bird [16] in the 1970s. It has been proven that a DSMC solution is an equivalent solution of the Boltzmann equation, and the method has been effectively used to solve gas flow problems in aerospace engineering. However, a disadvantageous feature of DSMC is heavy time consumption in computing, compared with the approach by solving the slip-flow or F-K models. This limits its application to two- or three-dimensional gas flow problems in microscale. In the 

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