Design procedures for orifice compensated gas journal bearings based on experimental data

This paper presents a method for designing externally pressurized gas journal bearings with orifice compensation. The design procedures include a basis for prediction of bearing stiffness, load, and flow rate for a range of typical bearing configurations, and allow an interactive procedure whereby the designer can visually interpret the effects of various design changes. Guidance is given on bearing geometry to maximise load carrying capacity. Recommendations are also given to enable the designer to select the number of orifices to achieve the predicted load carrying capacity, as well as guidance concerning pocket geometry to minimise the possibility of pneumatic hammer instabilities. The effects on design performance due to variations of bearing clearance and orifice diameter are included and provides a basis for the tolerancing procedure which is proposed