Water bearings can prevent seizure by supporting the shaft in a non-contact manner and provide a clean operating environment because oil is not used for lubrication. In addition, because highly viscous water is used as the working fluid, water bearings are more susceptible to the effects of shaft rotation than gaseous bearings. Recently, axial directed slot drawing type water bearings have been developed as a new structure, but their load capacity during shaft rotation has not been fully evaluated. In this study, the effects of shaft rotation speed and bearing dimensions on the load capacity of an axial directed slot drawing type water bearing were investigated using experiments and CAE analysis. As a result, it was found that the combined load capacity tended to increase with increasing rotational speed in water bearings, while the effect of shaft rotation was not observed in gaseous bearings.
ONOYAMA et al. (Wed,) studied this question.