Static behaviour of air plane pads: comparison between different feeding solutions

Air bearings are used among the others to support and guide coordinate measuring machines and instruments. There are different feeding solutions adopted to obtain the required stiffness and damping, often it is also important to minimize the air consumption. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of supply orifice number on the static characteristics of plane pad circular air bearings. Two solutions are experimentally investigated, with six and three supply inherent orifices of same dimensions. A test bench is used to obtain the static characteristics (load capacity and mass flow rate) of them pads. Then the static pressure distribution under the pads are experimentally determined in different directions. A numerical model is developed to simulate the behaviour of the pads; a comparisons between experimental and numerical results is presented.