Application of Materials on Foil Thrust Bearings for Micro Turbines

Abstract:

Foil bearing that has a soft surface is a kind of air bearing. The performances of foil bearings are greatly affected by the materials of bearing surface, which is called foil element. In order to estimate the performance of foil bearings, two kinds of foil thrust bearings that are made of different materials respectively were tested in a micro turbine system, which contains rotation part and static part. Load capacity and stability of these foil thrust bearings were investigated in experiments. The results show that bearing which contains rubber has higher load capacity and bearing which contains copper foil has higher stability. According to the work in this paper, applications with different requirements can adopt suitable foil thrust bearing.

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volumes 201-203)
• Pages: 2759-2762
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.201-203.2759
• Online since: February 2011
• Authors: Quan Zhou, Yu Hou, Ru Gang Chen
• Keywords: Bearing Stability, Copper Foil, Foil Bearing, Load Capacity, Rubber Foil

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