For many mechanical equiment such as hydropower turbines, steam turbines and propeller shafts, external load can be up to thousands of tons. For designing bearings of these mechanical systems in boundary lubrication and mixed lubricationv absorbing axial forces might not be feasible, particularly when these mechanisms change into hydrodynamic or hydrostatic lubrication. In lubrication mechanisms the Reynolds with boundary conditions and appropriate effects must be solved for the lubrication charateristics. Besides, it is essential to create properly experimental equipment for investigating these characteristics such as film pressure, temperature for validating with the solutions of the Reynolds equation. This paper presents a computational modelling of a thrust bearing using the standard finite element method and an experimental study of lubrication analysis of the bearing. The results show that the pressure distributions in terms of load and speed of the numerical model are correlated with ones of the experimental data.
