Cavitation has a potential effect on the performance of full circle journal bearings. This paper studied the effects of cavitation on steadily loaded journal bearings, with the purpose of analyzing the necessity of adopting a mass-conserving model for ordinary journal bearings. The Christopherson’s method and Elrod cavitation algorithm were implemented to represent the non-mass-conserving Reynolds model and the mass-conserving Jakobsson-Floberg-Olsson (JFO) theory, respectively. The difference in the oil film reformation boundaries predicted by the two methods was focused on. The typical performance parameters including oil film pressure, load-carrying capacity, attitude angle, friction force, and leakage were comprehensively compared. The results show that the load-carrying capacity is improved by the decrease in cavitation pressure, and the effect is significant in lightly loaded cavitated bearings. In non-cavitated cases and the cavitated cases with intermediate and heavy loads, the difference between the Reynolds model and the JFO theory can be effectively ignored, but the accuracy of the leakage predicted using the Reynolds model should be carefully evaluated.

Methods of partial oxidation for biomass tar conversion were studied based on their detailed reaction mechanism. The good accuracy of the modeling results compared with the experimental data indicate that the model was reasonable. Anisole was chosen as the tar model component for partial combustion with equivalence ratios (ER) from 0 to 0.8. The results show that oxygen promotes the pyrolysis of anisole and thereby the tar conversion rate. An appropriate amount of oxygen could crack tar into flammable small-molecule gases (H₂, CO) and inhibit the generation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compounds. In addition to the introduction of active free radicals, partial oxidation could also improve tar cracking by exothermic oxidation to produce amounts of heat. Typical PAH production was studied based on the rate of product formation (ROP). The results show that active radicals, such as H and OH, promote tar cracking. A detailed reaction pathway for tar conversion was built. Staged oxygen supply benefited the cracking of tar into small-molecule gases and inhibited the formation of PAHs.