Slider Bearing- MCE 454 Tribology

Members: Nick DiFilippo and Andy Choquette



Every year in Tribology, there is a slider bearing design competition. All students in Tribology must design a slider bearing that fits within certain design criteria and see how well it performs on an 8 foot track (The material that the track is made out of every year). The slider that is designed is required to have certain requirements such as having a mass greater than or equal to 500 grams, a width and length of less than 10 cm, and can be made of of Nylon 6-6 , Cold Rolled Steel 1018, or Aluminum 6061-T6.

For our design, Aluminum 6061-T6 was chosen because it was easy to machine and had a low surface roughness and the lubricant that was chosen was Canola oil due to its high viscosity, general availability, and it was non-toxic.

The geometry of the slider bearings design was determined by performing an order of magnitude analysis, simplifying the Continuity , Navier-Stokes, and Reynolds equations, and determining the center of mass of the slider bearing. These calculations helped to determine the step size and geometry of the slider as well as how well we believed our slider bearing was going to perform. All of these calculations can be found in the full report.

Full Report