Introduction to Air Bearings

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Advances in engineering and technology frequently place severe new demands upon the support systems for
machine components required to be in relative motion both in regard to improved performance and increasingly
exacting operating conditions. The great majority of these demands are met by some combination of clever design of
'conventional' bearing systems, the development of improved liquid lubricants for a great diversity of specialized
applications, and the devising of effective sealing techniques for circumstances in which it is essential to minimize the
leakage of lubricant liquids or their vapors.
However, in a growing number of applications it is becoming necessary to achieve a result which is either technically
or economically impracticable with conventional lubricants. Numerous alternative classes of bearing systems have
been devised to meet new requirements by means which are tailored to like circumstances. For example, in a
vacuum, a magnetic support may be employed (for low temperatures); for handling almost any liquid, the liquid itself
may be used as a lubricant although it may lack numerous convenient qualities available with lubricating oils; and for
numerous special purposes, including some very high temperature applications, solid lubricants such as graphite, or
molybdenum or tungsten disulfide, may be employed. Another alternative class of bearings is that which makes use
of a gas (air) as the lubricant. Air lubrication offers certain unique advantages, as in their own manner and place do
the other alternatives, but likewise air bearings themselves have their own inherent limitations which must be clearly
recognized in advance if the aspiring user is to avoid unwarranted failure.
In particular it must be recognized that air bearings of practically every type are somewhat more prone to instability
difficulties than are liquid bearings, although most of these instabilities are to a huge extent the same general type
that occur in liquid-lubricated systems; for example, the important case of half-speed whirl in self-acting 360 degree
journal. Pressurized bearings also have their instability problems although these are sometimes of a very different
type.
Classes of Air Bearings
Air bearings fall into two main classes, which indeed correspond to the two major representative classes in liquid film
lubricated bearings: aerostatic bearings, which require a feed of pressurized air for their operation, and aerodynamic
bearings, which generate their own internal pressure differentials. The latter generate this pressure by the action of
simultaneously shearing and squeezing the environmental gas between the surfaces in relative motion, whereas the
former require an external pump to produce the pressure. Both these types of bearing can be employed to sustain
either axial or radial loads in rotating systems (or direct loads in linear configurations), or to combine the functions in a
single member. A bearing can operate either entirely aerostatically or entirely aerodynamically throughout its
operating speed range, or the bearing can start its movement in one mode of operation and transfer to the other as
the speed changes, or it can operate with a combination of both aerostatic and aerodynamic pressure generation.
Under certain circumstances, moreover, it may be necessary to supply externally pressurized gas to a self-acting
bearing to prevent instabilities from arising. The flow regime in either type is usually laminar, but turbulent flow
conditions can occur.

In general, the externally pressurized bearings (aerostatic), for many purposes suffer an inherent disadvantage
through requiring a pressure source and an exhaust sink; but they can be made to relaxed manufacturing tolerances
and can provide support at low speeds, and sustain intermittent or stationary loads. The self-acting bearings
(aerodynamic), on the other hand, are able only to support a few pounds per square inch of bearing area depending
upon the speed, require careful manufacture and alignment and are only suitable for bearings whose surfaces are
always moving when under load. However, such bearings do not require auxiliary equipment and there is no problem
of disposing of the exhaust gas or arranging for appropriate pressure control of the working compartment. The
pressure gas for the externally pressurized type may, however, offer special advantages in particular circumstances.
For example, a pressure-fed bearing can work in a dust-laden atmosphere because the exhaust air prevents the
entry of solid particles from the environment.
Despite some limitations of load carrying capacity compared to other mechanical or rolling element bearings there are
numerous advantages, and some of them exclusive, that permit machine operation in conditions which would
otherwise be quite impracticable.
Exclusive Advantages of Air Bearings
The advantages which air lubrication can offer stem from the properties of gases: first, they are chemically stable
over a wide temperature range and second they have inherently low viscosities. However, even in this category it is
often practical to design an alternative device by a fundamentally different approach to the same job without air
bearings, and so it is really not feasible to draw a hard line between exclusive advantages and advantages of degree.
Nevertheless, it is believed that this way of thinking of the advantages available does avoid some confusion of
thought since it focuses attention upon aspects of a proposed application in which the gas really may be doing
something which no other lubricant could possibly do for fundamental reasons and those in which there is merely
competition in regard to convenience or cost.
Low Friction
Of the more important exclusive advantages which are offered by air lubrication are those cases where the low
viscosity of gases as compared with liquids can be exploited to special benefit. Particularly straightforward examples
of this class of application are those which occur in near-static apparatus such as gimbal support, dynamometers,
wind-tunnel balances and other specialized mechanical instruments which benefit from the extremely low static
frictional torque which externally pressurized bearings can offer. The use of a gas permits a torque orders of
magnitude smaller than could be achieved by liquids, but perhaps in practice often of more importance is the fact that
a low-torque bearing with an appropriately large operating clearance can be made in a very simple and clean fashion
using gas lubrication. Air is usually employed, since the exhaust from the bearing can be released to the
surroundings and quite large flow rates can be employed.
In semiconductor machine tools, high-speed, acceleration and damping are key to product throughput. The use of air
bearings in such an application has found widespread use. Experimental high speed linear slides of a composite
lightweight structure have operated at 14g acceleration for thousands of hours or repeated because of the low friction
aspects of air bearings. A mechanical rolling element-type bearing would never be able to satisfy such a
requirement. This low friction also finds uses in torque measuring equipment, dynamic balancing machinery,
semiconductor positioning systems, micro or zero gravity trajectory simulators and other instruments requiring near-
static conditions.
High Accuracy
The high accuracy of motion that can be obtained with air bearings is equally important in some applications.
Considerable differences in motion accuracy exist between rolling element bearing supports and air bearing supports.
In linear slides, for example, rolling element bearings witness noise error (or rumbling) due to the ways' surface
roughness and/or eccentric rotation of the rollers or balls.

On the contrary, air bearings do not suffer from this difficulty. The reason for this lies in the absence of surface
contact between the bearing parts and the averaging action of the air film over the various local surface irregularities
present in the machined surfaces. Even the finest of rolling element bearings are orders of the magnitude less
accurate than air bearings. In rotating air bearings, this effect produces high orders of rotational accuracy and
smoothness of travel. Typical T.I.R. for air bearing spindles are less than 1.0 inch. For linear slides, pitch, roll and
yaw errors of much less than a fraction of an arc second are attainable and straightness of travel errors on the order
of nanometers have been achieved.
High Stiffness
At zero speed, air bearings provide considerably high stiffness characteristics. This same effect is seen at zero or low
loads. For properly designed and manufactured aerostatic bearings, it is not uncommon to measure stiffness on the
order of several million pounds per inch.
Zero Wear
The advantage of zero wear can be seen greatly in externally pressurized or aerostatic bearings and to some large
degree in self-acting or aerodynamic bearings. Although some properly designed rolling element bearings can
achieve practical wear rates, none can match the zero wear characteristic of aerostatic bearings. With aerodynamic
bearings, starting and stopping causes some rubbing within the bearing clearance, but this can be alleviated by
introducing a pulse of air just as the bearing begins translation. Furthermore, as compared with rolling element
bearings, air bearings do not suffer from increased wear rates as the speed or load is increased. With proper care
and maintenance, infinite life can be expected from air bearings.
Note on crash resistance: allowing a bearing to crash or be overloaded to the grounded state should never be a
design feature. Crashed bearings are a sign of a much wider system problem and should be corrected regardless of
the type of bearing used.
Contamination
Gas lubrication has found a place of particular importance in circumstances where it is necessary to keep the
environment free from contamination by conventional lubricants. Such situations arise in semiconductor wafer
handling systems. In these situations, it may be costly or impractical to manufacture a system which can effectively
seal off contaminants from oil lubricants used in roller slides. The externally pressurized air bearing lends itself well to
harsh environments where liquids, dust and contaminants are present. The air bearing's great resilience stems from
the fact that with positive pressure existing inside the bearing, all foreign matter is repelled away from the critical
bearing surfaces. Externally pressurized bearings could operate while completely submerged in a liquid. Unlike some
rolling element bearing supports that require periodic maintenance, cleaning, the addition of oil lubricants and
sometimes the replacement or re-surfacing of guide ways, the air bearing's self-cleaning nature allows it to be
virtually maintenance-free.
Wide Temperature Range
Perhaps the most exclusive quality of gases as lubricants is their potential for operation over extremely wide ranges
of temperature. Indeed, it is the invulnerability of the solid components of the machine, not that of the lubricant, which
will set performance limits when simple gases are used for high temperature lubricated applications, although at the
lower end of the temperature scale condensation of the gas may become a limitation. Complex gases on the other
hand will have decomposition limitations at the upper end of their usable temperature range. No difficulty is seen, for
example, at the hot end end of the scale, in operating the bearings of small steam turbines or circulators upon
superheated steam, and, at the cold end, gases approaching their liquefaction temperatures could be employed to
lubricate the bearings of, for instance, gas liquefying turbines. In both examples considerable simplification of design
could thus be achieved in some situations. It is noted that whereas with liquids bearing performance falls off with rise
of temperature due to fall in viscosity, in the case of gases, the load-carrying performance will in general improve due
to a rise in viscosity.
Externally pressurized ceramic bearings were operated at temperatures of up to 1,500F (800C) at speeds of up to
65,000 rev/min. Low temperature applications of air bearings have been largely confined to various types of
expansion turbine gas liquefiers and to refrigeration plant. A small high-speed expansion turbine for liquefying helium
can operate at 350,000 rev/min. This unit employs bearings which are lubricated by helium gas at a temperature
between 50 and 13K, and the output of liquid helium is maintained at a pre-selected temperature of between 3 and
4K to an accuracy of 0.05.