Since 1994, New Way Air Bearings has been the market leader in Porous Media™ air bearing technology. Here’s where you’ll see real customer applications, get a sense of how the product performs and possibly spark creative ideas for your next design!
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.
New Way Air Bearings has a long and fruitful relationship with IBS Precision Engineering, a pioneer in coordinate measuring machines. Their latest innovation, the ISARA400, uses flat round air bearings to 50nm level precision across a three-dimensional measurement space.
Keck Observatory, often considered the world’s most scientifically productive observatory, turned to New Way when they needed help replacing their rolling-bearing-based rotary encoder. A system built on radial and flat round air bearings allowed for a new 1-meter diameter rotary table, cutting acquisition time by 75% and reducing maintenance to near zero.
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.
Multi-Plastics, Inc. provides almost 60% of the world’s polystyrene window film. So, when they saw the opportunity to improve production and cut downtime on their 24×7 production lines, they didn’t hesitate. Multi-Plastics integrated New Way Air Turns for their roll-to-roll processes, removing defects, creating uniform, tunable tension, and allowing for additional cooling.
To help provide Keystone Tower Systems, Inc. with the capability to manufacture straight and tapered wind turbine towers on-site, we partnered with our sister company, Devitt Machinery. This enabled the production of a solution to float flat round air bearings for a portable machine that can roll and weld a sheet of metal into a turbine tower.
Sytech Systems, Inc. provides hardware and software integration solutions, and when a medical client required precision beyond what an off-the-shelf manufacturing robot could provide, they called New Way. We worked to integrate flat round air bearings, developing a system with motion error below 1/1000 of an inch.
New Way partnered with Axis New England, a firm specializing in robotic and machine automation for the lithography, semiconductor, and precision optics industry. We provided them with a solution built on flat round air bearings to meet the needs of a customer who produces ultra-high format printers, allowing for high speeds and precise positioning.
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.
B&B Manufacturing Company, Inc. is a global supplier of threaded fasteners and machine parts, serving numerous industries from power generation and aerospace to petrochemical and medical. When they found ball bearings added too much error to their in-house designed roundness checker, they used New Way Radial and Flat Round Air Bearings to build a turntable with maximum accuracy.
When Guidance Dynamics Corporation needed to develop a friction-free testbed solution to accurately simulate robotic spacecraft, they turned to New Way. We paired them up with our Flat Round Air Bearings, providing an ideal foundation for creating a frictionless float uit over top of an epoxy testbed.
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.
