抄録
Recently, gas bearings have been used in high technology industry. But, conventional bearings have obliged mean clearance to be as wide as 20-30 μm by the use of inherently compensated restrictors. In this paper, an externally pressurized gas journal bearing is made as an experiment, and load capacity, stiffness and gas flow rate are measured. The test bearing is 30 mm in length, 30 mm in diameter, 3 mm in pocket diameter and 0.05, 0.1 and 0.2 mm in orifice diameter respectively. Following conclusions are obtained. (1) By the use of pocketed orifice restrictors, the stiffness is the highest at 7-13 μm in mean radial clearance without generating pneumatic hammer instability. (2) As the bearing can be operated with a narrow clearance, gas flow rate is about 4 L/min with 0.1 mm in orifice diameter and 10 μm in radial clearance at supply pressure of 0.6 MPa.
