Numerical Study on the Air-Cushion Glass Transportation Unit for LCD Panels

Non-contact transportation system using air cushion for the manufacturing of large-sized LCD panels was considered. Flow characteristics between air pad and glass plate was analyzed using computational fluid dynamics method to obtain optimized air pad configurations. Effects of the design variables such as hole arrays from which gas is injected, gas-feeding method into the gas supplying channels, and horizontal and vertical pitches of clusters of holes were studied. Optimized air pad unit gave evenly distributed pressure contour on the glass surface and well-suspended levitation height in the experiment.