Ultra precision air bearing development for low cost manufacturing.

Abstract

Air bearings today are extensively used in the industry, the manufacturing processes involved in fabricating these bearings are complicated and have major drawbacks. The current research investigates the failure of aerostatic bearings based upon which a manufacturing process is developed which removes the correlation between the bearing surface and the effective gap between these surfaces. This results in low manufacturing errors due to the omission of repeated machining of the bearing surface. The second factor that is novelty towards this research is the application of aluminium coated with hard nickel as suitable alternative to bearing base material instead to the current material for aerostatic bearings. This proposed material solution has low density, good wear resistance and good corrosion resistance. This allows the application of diamond turning instead of precision grinding as the bearing machining process. Reducing on majority of the manufacturing while achieving the form accuracy of the bearing surface. The third novelty factor is the application of bi-conic configuration which would allow self-aligning capability and has a smaller packaging size as compared to any other fluid film mechanical configuration.