Assessment of possible application of water-lubricated sintered brass slide bearing for marine propeller shaft

Abstract

Water-lubricated bearings have been applied to support ship screw shafts for over a hundered years. Development of plastic materials has caused that novel sliding polymers appeared available on the market and being approved by classification institutions, possible to be applied in shipbuilding. However in the subject – matter literature there is no reference to application of bearings fitted with metal or ceramic bushes in shipbuilding. Nevertheless they have important merits such as low resistance to motion, long service life or stability of form. But some doubts are evoked by their large value of shape elasticity module which can lead to local stress concentration at the bush edges in the case of non-axiality of bush and shaft axes. Hence this work has been aimed at the testing of a bearing made of bronze-graphite silter. In the work is presented a comparison of measurement results of resistance to motion, hydrodynamic pressure distributions in lubricating film as well as shaft axis trajectories of the bearing, with those made for a typical elastic polymer bearing. The measurement results have showed high quality of the tested material. In the opinion of these authors it could be applicable to bearing ship propeller shafts.