An aerostatic pad compensated by a differential diaphragm valve

This paper presents a novel prototype of a passively compensated aerostatic pad which consists in the integration of a commercial pad with a custom-built differential diaphragm valve. The static performance of the system is experimentally assessed in the presence of different supply and reference pressures. Additionally, the paper describes two lumped parameter models of the system which present different level of complexity. Experimental and numerical results are in good agreement and demonstrate that the static performance of the system can be computed more quickly through the simplified version of the described models.