Lubricated rolling over a pool

Experiments are conducted to explore the rolling of a cylinder over a pool of viscous fluid. The speed, width and loading of the cylinder are varied along with the initial depth and length of the viscous pool. Depending on the conditions, the cylinder will either ride on a lubrication film or remain in solid contact with the underlying substrate. For the former situation, a lubrication theory is presented that describes the pressure underneath the cylinder and the thickness of the film. The theory approximates the flow by the one-dimensional Reynolds equation with the addition of one term, with an adjustable parameter, to account for the flux of fluid to the cylinder sides. Once this parameter is calibrated against experiment, the theory predicts peak lubrication pressures, gap sizes and film thicknesses to within approximately ten per cent. For lubricated rolling, the film splits evenly between the cylinder and substrate downstream of the nip. The printer's instability arises during the splitting process, patterning the residual fluid films on the substrate and cylinder. If the pool length is less than the cylinder circumference, the fluid adhering to the cylinder is rotated back into contact with the substrate, and when there is sufficient adhered fluid a lubrication film forms that can again be modelled by the theory. Conversely, if there is insufficient adhered fluid, no contiguous lubrication film is formed; instead, the pattern from the printer's instability ‘prints’ from the cylinder to the substrate.