Gas-Dynamic Foil Bearings Application in High-Speed Turbines

Technical Development Path for Foil Gas Bearings

Foil gas bearings are in widespread commercial use in air cycle machines, turbocompressors and microturbine generators and are emerging in more challenging applications such as turbochargers, auxiliary power units and propulsion gas turbines. Though not well known, foil bearing technology is well over fifty years old. Recent technological developments indicate that their full potential has yet ...

Dynamic Response of Self-Acting Foil Bearings

A new approach to the analysis of wide foil bearings is investigated. The equation of motion for a finite length of tape is coupled to the transient lubrication equation for the air film between the tape and the recording head. Compressibility and slip flow are retained in the fluid mechanics equation; flexural rigidity and high-speed dynamic effects are retained in the tape equation. The stead...

High Speed Rotors on Gas Bearings: Design and Experimental Characterization

Computational Analysis of Gas Foil Bearings Integrating 1D and 2D Finite Element Models for Top Foil

Gas foil bearings (GFBs) are finding widespread usage in oil-free turbo expanders, APUs and micro gas turbines for distributed power due to their low drag friction and ability to tolerate high level vibrations, including transient rubs and severe misalignment, static and dynamic. The static load capacity and dynamic forced performance of GFBs depends largely on the material properties of the su...

Study of Micro-High Speed Bearings and

Micromachine gas turbines require extremely high rotor speed to realize the same impeller tip speed to the large gas turbines, by very small diameter of the impellers. Hence, the rotordynamics is one of the critical issues. Especially, the bearing speed will exceed the range of experience in any existing turbomachines, and hence the method to achieve the stable operation at the required design ...