Oil is the main working fluid used in the hydraulics industry today — but water is nonflammable, environmentally friendly and cheap: it is the better choice of working fluid for hydraulic systems. However, there is one caveat. Water’s extremely low viscosity undermines its ability to carry load. In forest machinery, construction machinery, and aircraft systems, today’s hydraulic circuits have high operating pressures, with typical values between 300 and 420 bar. These high pressures create the need for high load-carrying abilities in the fluid films of the tribological interfaces of pumps and motors. The most challenging of these interfaces is the piston-cylinder interface of swashplate type piston machines, because the fluid must balance the entire piston side load created in this design. The low viscosity of the water turns preventing metal-to-metal contact into quite a challenge. Fortunately, an understanding of how pressure builds and shifts about in these piston-cylinder lubrication interfaces, coupled with some clever micro surface shaping, can allow engineers to drastically increase the load-carrying ability of water. As part of this research, numerous different micro surface shaping design ideas have been simulated using a highly advanced non-isothermal multi-physics model developed at the Maha Fluid Power Research Center. The model calculates leakage, power losses, film thickness and pressure buildup in the piston-cylinder interface over the course of one shaft revolution. The results allow for the comparison of different surface shapes, such as axial sine waves along the piston, or a barrel-shaped piston profile. This paper elucidates the effect of those surface profiles on pressure buildup, leakage, and torque loss in the piston-cylinder interface of an axial piston pump running at high pressure with water as the lubricant.
