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Remove Friction and Add Performance to Machine Operations

 

Air Bearing Products from New Way Air Bearings Remove Friction and Add Performance to Machine Operations

Friction is often the enemy in machine operations. Created by surface contact, friction causes wear that deteriorates machine elements, ultimately reducing performance and life. Contact roller bearings experience friction caused by load speed, lubricant, and other elements. While lubrication is added to reduce friction effects, it can contaminate cleanrooms and vacuum environments.

New Way® Air Bearing products avoid traditional bearing-related problems associated with friction and wear, offering high-speed and high-precision capabilities with no oil lubrication requirements. Featuring proprietary Porous Media Technology™, New Way’s air bearings distribute a thin film of pressurized air to provide a “zero friction” load bearing interface between surfaces for a higher level of operational accuracy and control.

Easily integrated into prototype designs or custom assemblies, New Way’s air bearing products are available in a variety of configurations to address different application requirements. Here’s how New Way’s air bearings work:

  • Easy to install within a machine tool or system, flat air bearings simplify the task of designing and building custom air bearing assemblies. Available in round and rectangular shapes, designs feature a gimbled mount that allows for great flexibility in tolerance and threaded ball studs for trouble-free alignment. Appropriate for high-loaded and high-speed applications, flat air bearings are ideal for scanning machines, diamond turning machines, material testing machines, and tensile strength testing.
  • For use in precision rotary motion applications, radial bearings can support a rotor from just a small percentage of its circumference with 10x the speed capacity but at 100x less friction than a roller bearing. Available in concave and convex shapes, these bearings are available for shafts as small as 25 mm and for rings as large as 3 meters.
  • Eliminating cumbersome preloading arrangements, vacuum pre-loaded bearings combine X and Y linear motion and theta rotation on one flat surface, eliminating the need to stack several separate stages to minimize height. The result is an efficient, stable, and low-profile solution for multi-axis motion applications common in the semiconductor industry.
  • Spherical bearings support a sphere on a thin layer of air for a non-contacting operation that results in infinite resolution, high-speed, zero wear and silent performance without vibration. These scalable components are ideal for aerospace and defense applications such as zero-G satellite testing, attitude control testing, multi-directional control, flight simulators, laser deflection and precision spindles.

In addition to its standard air bearing products, New Way can integrate a mounting component or provide a custom-engineered solution to meet specific requirements. Tell us about your application by contacting us today.

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