###### Abstract
These theoretical studies primarily focused on the thermal performance of the fluid film and assumed that the heat was only generated by the viscous shear of the fluid film. However, during operation, the asperity contact friction heat caused by the contact effect at the journal bearing interface affects the performance significantly. The aforementioned studies fail to evaluate the thermal behavior originating from the asperity contact effect. To predict the thermal performance of WLRSBs more accurately, in the present study, the heat generated by the contact effect has been integrated in the thermal analysis. Subsequently, a general transfer equation based on the Euler method was used for simulating the thermal behavior of the journal, water film, and rubber bushing (JWR) system. It is noteworthy that misalignment caused by the deflection of the propeller shaft has been observed to be a familiar phenomenon in a stern bearing system because WLRSBs exhibit a larger length-to-diameter ratio compared with general journal bearings. Recently, the effects of journal misalignment on the performance of the journal bearing interface have been investigated by many scholars ([PERSON] et al. [8]; [PERSON] et al. [10]; [PERSON] et al. [12]; [PERSON] et al. [15]; [PERSON] et al. [16]; [PERSON] et al. [23]; [PERSON] et al. [30]; [PERSON] et al. [31]). Figure 1: Assembly and operating mechanism for a water-lubricated rubber stem bearing (WLRSB). In these studies, [PERSON] et al. [8] and [PERSON] et al. [22] calculated the misalignment using the external load acting on the journal and concluded that the tribology performance of the bearing was sensitive to misalignment of the journal, especially under a large eccentricity ratio. [PERSON] et al. analyzed the effects of shaft misalignment on the stability of journal bearings, and the thermal effects due to viscous shearing of oil film were also included in [PERSON]'s study. [PERSON] et al. [11], [PERSON] et al. [12], [PERSON] et al. [30], and [PERSON] et al. [31] investigated the tribology performance of a misaligned bearing numerically under given misalignment parameters, i.e., degree of misalignment and misalignment direction angle. In the current study, in order to obtain the misalignment of the propeller shaft more accurately, the external force applied to the end face of the WLRSB and the hydrodynamic and contact forces were combined to determine the deflection of the propeller shaft under the FSH coupling conditions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the FSH coupling performance of a WLRSB when the force-driven deflected shaft is taken into account. In order to evaluate the deflection of the shaft more accurately, the segmented mixed forces along the axial direction (i.e., hydrodynamic and contact forces) serve as the input information in the deformation analysis of the shaft, and the superposition method is applied to attain the deflection of the propeller shaft. Subsequently, the FSH coupling model is coupled with the deflection model to identify the deflected shaft effect on the FSH predictions. The proposed model is validated by comparing it with published experimental results. Therefore, this study can provide a more practical model to predict the FSH coupling performance for WLRSBs.