GT-SUITE predicts friction, wear, and lubrication performance across engines, compressors, and mechanical systems, using physics-based oil film and contact models to drive low-friction, high-durability designs.
Solution Overview
Friction and wear at bearings, gears, pistons, and other moving contacts erode efficiency and shorten component life across engines, drivelines, and industrial machinery, and problems are often only caught in physical testing, late in the design cycle when fixes are expensive. GT-SUITE’s Friction and Tribology solution lets engine, driveline, and machinery design teams find and fix these issues virtually, before hardware is ever built.
The solution is built on validated physics: oil film hydrodynamics, elastohydrodynamic (EHD) contact models, and a statistical asperity contact model that together capture how load is shared between the lubricant film and direct surface contact at every interface, accounting for how temperature, pressure, and shear rate affect lubricant viscosity and surface geometry. Because these tribology models run directly inside GT-SUITE’s multibody models of cranktrains, valvetrains, and other moving assemblies, they use the real loads and speeds the system generates rather than simplified estimates, giving physics-accurate friction predictions engineers can trust.
Teams can explore far more design and operating combinations than manual testing allows, converging faster on low-friction, high-durability designs and root-causing wear or seizure issues before they reach the field.
Application Highlights
Advanced Features
GT-SUITE supports advanced wear analysis, root cause diagnostics, surface texturing, and fully integrated MBD and lubrication modeling.
Run virtual DoE studies across geometry, lubricant, and operating parameters to identify optimal designs for efficiency, friction, and durability, and simulate failure modes to isolate root causes and predict field failures before they happen, far faster and cheaper than physical test programs.
Fully coupled with lubrication circuit models to predict the pressures and flow rates each bearing, gear mesh, or contact interface needs, and how supply variation affects performance.
Tribological contacts run inside full multibody models of cranktrains, valvetrains, gear trains, and drivetrains, so friction predictions reflect actual system-level speeds, loads, and dynamics
Reconstruct component-level stripdown friction measurements virtually across the full system, validating models against test and identifying the biggest friction contributors.
Import measured profilometer data directly and model shear-thinning, temperature-, and pressure-dependent viscosity for physically accurate asperity contact behavior.
Train fast-running surrogate models on simulation results to explore design and operating spaces in real time, enabling rapid trade-off studies and optimization without re-running the full physics model for every case.
Learn More
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