  The Reynolds equation, combined with the Elrod algorithm for including the
effect of cavitation, resembles a nonlinear convection-diffusion-reaction (CDR)
equation. Its solution by finite elements is prone to oscillations in
convection-dominated regions, which are present whenever cavitation occurs. We
propose a stabilized finite-element method that is based on the variational
multiscale method and exploits the concept of orthogonal subgrid scales. We
demonstrate that this approach only requires one additional term in the weak
form to obtain a stable method that converges optimally when performing mesh
refinement.
