Water-lubricated thrust bearing is one of the key parts in canned motor pump, for example, the RCP in AP1000, and it functions to balance axial loads. A calculation model which can handle all flow state lubrication performance for water-lubricated thrust bearing has been presented. The model first includes laminar and turbulent Reynolds' equation. Then to get continuous viscosity coefficients cross critical Reynolds number, a transition zone which ranges based on engineering experience is put up, through which Hermite interpolation is employed. The model is numerically solved in finite difference method with uniform grids. To accelerate the calculation process, multigrid method and line relaxation is adopted within the iteration procedure. A medium sized water-lubricated tilting pad thrust bearing is exampled to verify the calculation model. Results suggest that as rotating speed enlarges, lubrication state distribution of the thrust bearing gradually tends to turbulent lubrication from the intersection corner of pad outer diameter and pad inlet to the opposite, minimum water film thickness increases approximately linearly, maximum water film pressure has little change, meanwhile the friction power grows nearly in exponential law which could result in bad effect by yielding much more heat.
