Slewing ring bearings built on porous technology float on a micrometer thin cushion of air, providing truly frictionless motion to your application. This opens the door to considering parts lasting on the order of decades. Case in point, several custom slewing ring type air bearings have been in use on the New Way manufacturing floor since the 1980’s.

The lack of any dynamic components in our frictionless slewing rings also removes the inherent inertia of the ball, roller or needle bearing assembly. This in turns produces a system with zero hysteresis error or positioning overshoot, which is invaluable when considering highly precise rotary applications such as observatory positioning.

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The unique nature of our porous media products makes porous media slewing rings an inherently cleanroom compatible technology. While air is already cleaned and filtered prior to entering the bearing, the size of the openings in the bearing face acts as a natural sib-micron filter. Internal testing by New Way places all of our bearing products as being ISO Class 3 cleanroom compliant (less than 1,000 x 0.1μm particles / m3), and arguably even meeting the stringent requirements for ISO Class 1.

For the modern manufacturing facility, whether it be pharmaceutical, semiconductors, or aerospace, cleanroom manufacturing is rapidly becoming a best practice, and our slewing rings are up to the task.

Our current line of LID Series slewing ring air bearings has been designed from the ground up to be a bolt on replacement for existing roller bearing solutions, not just retrofit compatible, but a bolt for bolt solution requiring no modifications or adapters.