Zugl.: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2004.

Techn. Hochsch., Diss.--Aachen, 2006.

Techn. Hochsch., Diss. 2005--Aachen.

The temperature distribution of the lubricating interfaces is an important aspect of the functioning of positive displacement machines. It can determine the efficiency and the life time of the unit. In particular, it directly affects the fluid properties and the thermal induced deformations of the solid bodies. A simulation tool capable of predicting the fluid temperature in such gaps thus becomes very useful in the design process of these machines. The temperature distribution in a film comprises of many physical phenomena including convection and conduction along and across the film. Past numerical approaches solved this multi-directional conduction-convection problem using a threedimensional(3D) grid, making the tool computationally expensive and unsuitable for fast simulations. This paper proposes a hybrid fluid temperature solver, based on, a low computational cost twodimensional(2D) grid, to reduce the simulation time with reasonable accuracy. The piston/cylinder interface of an axial piston machine is selected as reference case to demonstrate the proposed approach. The hybrid approach was found to speedup the simulation times by 36%.