Design and development of orifice-type aerostatic thrust bearing

Air bearings are extensively used in pre- cision machines and equipment in recent years. Unlike conventional bearings, there is no physical contact between the sliding surfaces. The moving surface can glide smoothly on the other surface, minimising the control effort to achieve high accuracy and precision. Analytical study was carried out avoiding complexi- ties in the formulation. The governing parameters were kept at a minimum. This helped in easy under- standing of the dynamics and performance behavior of the air bearings. A simple design methodology was also developed to assist in the design or the selection process of the bearing. Finally, a three-dimensional (3D) model was built for Computational Fluid Dy- namics (CFD) analysis to verify the theoretical result. A test set-up was designed to measure and study the static and dynamic performance of different kind of air bearings for future air bearing development. More- over, the experimental data were also taken and com- pared with the analytical results.