• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.30 no.12
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• pp.1327-1333
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• 2013

Air bearings are widely used in precision stages because of low friction and high motion accuracy, however, they suffer from low stiffness in comparison with rolling bearings or hydrostatic bearings. So, several preloading methods using weight, magnet and vacuum force, and opposing pads have been used to increase the stiffness of the air bearings. In this paper, pressure distributions of the vacuum preloaded porous air bearings are calculated using the proposed method. And then, the load capacity and stiffness are analyzed. For the vacuum preloaded air bearings, the stiffness is increased owing to reduced bearing clearance by vacuum force. The simulation results indicate that variation of vacuum pressure with clearance in the vacuum pocket gives rise to low stiffness, so the vacuum pocket should be designed for pressure to be constantly maintained regardless of the bearing clearance by means of large effective pumping speed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.25 no.12
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• pp.132-138
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• 2008

Recently, mastering processes for high density optical disc such as Blu-ray disc rely on electron beams, which are operable in only vacuum. In the mastering process, one of the most important tasks is to design precision stages for providing precise positioning of the works with respect to the source in a high vacuum environment. In this paper, we have developed a precision rotation table usable in the electron beam mastering. The rotation table adopted air bearings for a high positioning repeatability and velocity stability. The air leakage from the air bearings has been minimized by employing the differential exhaust scheme using three steps of air drain. The design parameters such as diameters of exhaust lines, seal lengths, and pumping speeds were decided according to the optimization method using genetic algorithm. The performance on the vacuum level of the rotation table was evaluated experimentally and theoretically. The results indicate that a vacuum level of $10^{-4}$ Pa is achieved with operation of air bearings in a vacuum chamber, which is sufficient for the electron beam mastering.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.502-506
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• 2012

Air bearing is characterized by its extremely low friction and cleanliness such that it is widely used especially for spindles with ultra-high rotational speed at several tens of thousands rpm. This paper contributes to design of a static radial air bearing suggesting numerical analysis to anticipate its performances. The numerical analysis is an iteration method based on finite difference formulation of the Reynolds equation. A prototype air bearing has been designed and manufactured. Its load capacity has been measured and compared with the numerical solutions. The result shows good consistency between the experiment and theory, which informs that the numerical analysis can be used as an useful tool to anticipate the performances. Effects of design variables on the bearing performance have been examined by Taguchi's experimental methods using orthogonal array. Number of holes for supplying pressurized air, clearance between shaft and bearing, the hole diameter and bearing length are chosen for the design variables. The result shows that the clearance and the bearing length are the most influential variables while the others can be considered as almost negligible.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.1170-1176
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• 2006

This study aims to investigate numerically the static and dynamic stiffness characteristics of porous air bearing and to estimate appropriate permeability values of porous medium. In particular, a new roughness model is proposed and implemented into the commercial CFD code (FLUENT Ver.6.2). The predicted results are extensively compared with experimental data for static cases. The roughness model is also validated through comparison with the results from open literature. For the dynamic cases, the deforming and re-meshing technique is used for describing fluid-solid interactions. It is found that the predictions for static stiffness are in good agreement with experimental data and the dynamic stiffness appears to be relatively smaller than the static stiffness. In addition, moving and dynamic analysis of air bearing seems to be possible to provide qualitative predictions even if there are somewhat discrepancies quantitatively, compared to experimental data.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.86-95
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• 2007

This paper presents the optimal design of an exhaust system of a vacuum-compatible air bearing using a genetic algorithm. To use the air bearings in vacuum conditions, the differential exhaust method is adopted to minimize the air leakage, which prevents air from leaking into a vacuum chamber by recovering air through several successive seal stages in advance. Therefore, the design of the differential exhaust system is very important because several design parameters such as the number of seals, diameter and length of an exhaust tube, pumping speed and ultimate pressure of a vacuum pump, seal length and gap(bearing clearance) influence on the air leakage, that is, chamber's degree of vacuum. In this paper, we used a genetic algorithm to optimize the design parameters of the exhaust system of a vacuum-compatible air bearing under the several constraint conditions. The results indicate that chamber's degree of vacuum after optimization improved dramatically compared to the initial design, and that the distribution of the spatial design parameters, such as exhaust tube diameter and seal length, was well achieved, and that technical limit of the pumping speed was well determined.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.269-275
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• 2005

This article describes the development on a new style active hybrid bearing system including both merits of an aerostatic bearing system and a magnetic bearing system. The developed active hybrid bearing system has several advantages: exact rotation, robust controller against the variation of a disturbance, improvement of stiffness and a damper of the system at a high-speed operation, and constraints of the heat generated by a bias current. In order to measure a rotating error due to the change of a cutting force and the variation of a system parameter, a CCS (Cylindrical Capacity displacement Sensor) was used.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.6 no.2 s.19
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• pp.7-14
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• 2003

This paper describes reliability characteristics of an air foil journal bearing for high-speed turbomachinery at a room temperature. To verify the reliability of air foil journal bearing, lift-off characteristics, load carrying capacity, and 10,000 cycle start-stop test were performed with a motor-driven test rig. A lift-off test shows the relationship between the rotating speed of the shaft and the frictional torque with bearing surface. About a load-carrying capacity, the tested air foil journal bearing produced a load capacity of 500N at an operating speed of 15,000rpm, which is compared with results of numerical analysis and empirical coefficients. Finally, the trends in change of start torque, stop torque, and bearing temperature were shown during a 10,000-cycle start-stop test of an air foil journal bearing. We found that an air foil bearing performs well, as a supported bearing for the high-speed turbocompressor.

• Aerospace Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.19-26
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• 2012

The requirement for the aerodynamic hub drag, allocated from the system requirement of development of a bearingless rotor hub, was analyzed and embodied to be substantiated by the methodology assigned from the requirement. Drag prediction for the initial hub configuration was carried out by hand calculation using aerodynamic drag coefficients and the design change about the sectional shape of torque tube was suggested to satisfy the requirement. Finally, drag prediction was performed for the changed hub configuration by using unstructured overset mesh technique and parallel computation and the calculated result satisfied the requirement of the aerodynamic hub drag. It was found that the drag of final hub configuration was also within the range of drag inferred from the trendline of developed helicopter.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.309-314
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• 2017

This paper presents a theoretical investigation of the dynamic characteristics of externally pressurized air pad bearings with closed loop grooves. These grooves are made on the surface of bearings to reduce the number of supply holes so that manufacturing costs can be reduced. The semi-implicit method is applied to calculate the time varying pressure profile on the air bearing surface owing to the advantages of numerical stability and fast time tracing characteristics. The static pressure of the groove bearings is much higher than that without grooves, so the groove bearings can provide high load carrying capacity. The equation of motion considering vertical motion and tilting motion are also solved using the Runge-Kutta 4th order method. By combining the semi-implicit method and the Runge-Kutta method, fast calculations of the dynamic behavior of the air bearing can be achieved. The variations of bearing reaction force, air film reaction moment, height, and tilting angle are investigated for the step force input, which is 20% higher than the bearing reaction, when the nominal clearance is 6 mm. The effect of the groove width and the groove depth are investigated by calculating the dynamic behavior. The possibility of the air hammering with the depth of the groove is found and discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.792-796
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• 2009

Application of air foil bearing (AFB) is widely using to cope with requirements of high speed and high efficiency system at turbo machinery. At same time, a wide variety of AFB design methods are required. In this paper, the AFB design factor influencing the most greatly in bearing performance was selected through theoretical analysis and vibration test was conducted using selected factor. Through this process, AFB system applicable for vehicle turbo machinery was developed.