New Way® Air Bushings are ideal for rotary or linear shaft-based applications and can be found where precision motion is required. Our air bushings provide a frictionless alternative to ball bearings through the use of our proprietary Porous Media Technology™.

While contact ball bearings are a standard solution for rotary shaft applications, their drawbacks are numerous. The inertia inherent to contact bearings can lead to unwanted motion, and their friction requires lubrication, which only forestalls inevitable wear and tear.

For a better solution, the air bushing forms its porous media into a tube containing millions of sub-micron holes. The natural permeability of the porous carbon provides an even distribution of thin, but stiff air, and allows for a self-centering force, providing 360-degree, noncontact motion on round shafts.

Retrofitting an air bushing based system to one originally built for ball bearings is a simple task achieved through our in-house pillow blocks, which accommodate co-polymer O rings, allowing for correction of parallelism errors up to 0.002’ over the length of the shaft.

If your usage case requires one end to be constrained axially, we also offer thrust bushings as an extension of air bushing technology. If you have a rotary application with a heavier mass than an air bushing would support, our radial air bearings are highly modular and well suited to large shaft applications, vs our bushings, which are geared more towards linear applications, or smaller rotary ones