Measurements of Pressure Distribution and Load Carrying Capacity on Thrust Air Bearing having Optimum Groove Geometry

Recently, air bearings are used in high speed and light weight machinery because of their low friction, low environmental load, maintenance-free and so on. On the other hand, the air bearings have low resistant against the outer vibration. Therefore it is important to enhance the stiffness of the bearing. Under the back ground, the authors proposed the high stiffness air bearing which is designed by using the newly developed geometrical optimization method and we conclude the reason for obtaining the high stiffness as generating the negative pressure in the outer vicinity of bearing surface. However, the negative pressure has not been confirmed experimentally yet. In this study, the pressure distribution and load carring capacity of the optimized thrust air bearing are measured under several film thickness conditions by using the high speed experimental setup and then, the reason why the high stiffness is obtained in the optimized bearing was discussed.