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.
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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
Download our air bushing installation guide (shown on right) for a step-by-step guide on how to hard mount an air bushing to one of our standard mounting blocks, as well as how to set up an air bushing for precision shaft usage, through the usage of bonded epoxy.
New Way Air Bearings are ideally suited for cleanroom environments, or production and inspection environments where the airborne particulate count must be kept to an absolute minimum. Because air bearings naturally act as a sub-micron filter, the very nature of an air bearings’ operation filters the air which flows through, preventing the vast majority of particle infiltration. Additionally, noncontact air bearings eliminate the need for lubrication and the particulate generating tendencies of contact motion solutions, removing one more avenue for particles to enter an environment.
Internal New Way testing (which you can download and read, on the right) has shown porous media air bearings meet the requirements of ISO Class 3 cleanliness, producing less than 1,000 x 0.1μm particles / m3, and arguably meet the incredibly stringent class 1 requirements for producing only single-digit numbers of particles during the test period.
With friction removed, New Way Air Bushings offer a number of operational efficiencies available across industries. Several example industries and the benefits they are seeing are listed here. Feel free to contact us today directly for use in your application!
New Way Air Bushings are available in standard English and metric sizing. Need a custom size? Contact our engineering team to get started with your turnkey solution!
New Way provided H2W Technologies, a leader in precision motion control solutions, with our Flat Round Air bearings, Air Bushings and Dovetail Linear Slides for integration into large-scale inspection stages requiring exceptional flatness and straightness.
Magtrol Inc., a leader in torque measurement for small motors, recognized the unique capability of air bearings to provide frictionless torque measurements. They upgraded their calibration suits through radial air bearings and air bushings, providing a frictionless solution backed by engineering support they could trust.
Libertine FPE, Ltd. had stringent requirements for the dynamic test actuator they were developing for the automotive industry, and needed minimal friction and hysteresis error. They came to New Way, where we provided our engineering support, and helped them integrate our air bushings; creating a product to simulate road conditions and accurately reproduce noise and vibrations.
During the construction of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the European Southern Observatory (ESO) partnered with New Way to build the “OzPoz” multi-fiber positioner. Air bushings and flat round air bearings formed the basis for this precision instrument, which required 10 microns in order to build a robotic system capable of aligning the telescope.
New Way doesn’t just support the sciences, but also the arts as well, and we were proud to see our air bushings and flat round air bearings help bring the GLOW event in Eindhoven, Netherlands, to life. The Large Pendulum Wave used our air bearings to demonstrate the physicality of swinging frequency through the beauty of light in motion.
If you have any questions about our air bushings, applications, or installations, please contact us!
