The focus of the EHD model of a crankshaft was the elastic deformation of the lower bearing connecting rod and the associated change in the contour.
For this purpose, the first connecting rod has been mapped as an elastic body by a finite element discretization. The bearing surface was very finely meshed in order to detect local deformations of the hydrodynamics.
Due to a static GUYAN reduction and modal transformation the global and the local deformation could be mapped with 200 modal degrees of freedom. The remaining components of the crank mechanism are rigid. The primary and the remaining connecting rod bearings were modeled as HD bearings with tilting effects.
In the animation of the results, the deformation of the bearing shell can be seen. During the ignition the deformation dominates in the con-rod center.