Linear Motion Bearings
For unparalleled straightness of motion over metal or stone guideways.
New Way Air Bearings® is always dedicating ourselves to providing the benefits of frictionless media to as many industries as possible. Today we see a massive benefit to the materials handling market. Currently valued at 140 billion dollars and expected to cross 200 billion by 2027, the materials handling market encompasses everything from food and packaging to metal fabrication, recycling, and sorting operations. These types of conveyance technologies are expected to be fast, reliable, and cost-effective. And, New Way is here to show how air bearings provide their trademark advantage on all of these metrics.
Metals Processing
The demand for metal processing and recycling has only grown as our world demands a greater supply of materials, while simultaneously growing conscious of our carbon footprint. Air bearing based products provide the reliability, thermal resistance, and scalability for any large scale manufacturing, recycling, or forming facility
High-Speed Sorting and Shipping
The shape of commerce in the 21st century is defined by online shopping, and shipping volumes have grown commensurate with consumers’ desire for prompt delivery. To keep up with demands, distribution centers require the absolute best in sorting technology. These technologies must not only be fast, but also reliable so as to never bring these buzzing hives of 24/7 activity to a halt. Air bearing technology can form the basis for exceptionally fast sorting systems, operating around the clock without fear of failure.
For pick-and-place sorting and other applications where you need precise, fast motion, New Way offers a broad array of linear motion-based air bearing products to support your needs. Our Flat Round and Flat Rectangular Air Bearings can easily be retrofitted to upgrade bearing-based movement stages, and we also offer our Linear Slides (in four different varieties) for a fully prebuilt linear motion stage. All of the options above can also be configured in XY- and even XYZ-gantry formations for 2D and 3D motion.
Due to air’s natural thermal conductivity and the lack of dynamic, contacting components, air bearings are highly suited to operation in high heat environments, like those often found in metal forging and processing facilities. New Way offers a wide array of products for conveying. Initially designed for semiconductors and flat panel displays (FPDs), our Air Bars offer speed and precision through tunable fly height, allowing you to use a combination of positive pressure and vacuum pressure to maintain control over your material during the handling phase.
For quickly spooling, unspooling, or handling delicate materials during printing, inspection, and transportation processes, New Way has developed our revolutionary Air Turns™, which replace contact roller technology with our Porous Media Technology™. Air Turns allow for the noncontact handling of flexible films and substrates at high speed, with up to a 180-degree turn angle. For roll-to-roll application, which might be too heavy for Air Turns, our Air Spindles and Radial Air Bearings can be quickly retrofitted for shaft-mounted applications, allowing for an exceptionally high-speed roll-to-roll process.
Reliability
Package sorting facilities are expected to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and with criteria like that, a spalled bearing can be catastrophic for your facility. New Way Air Bearings offer a noncontact technology with zero dynamic components—all of which means that air bearings will never wear down and never fail due to wear and tear. Even in the event of complete power loss, air bearings slowly depressurize, and the soft carbon surface protects the load it’s carrying.
Speed
Time is money, and for materials processing, even more so. Conventional bearing technology is constrained by friction between the balls or rollers and the races they interface with. Since air bearings operate off a 5-micron thin layer of air, the friction coefficient is zero, and air bearings can achieve and maintain speeds up to 10 times that of equivalent ball bearing systems.
Control
When handling newly formed metals, polymers, or sorting shipping goods, maintaining control over your products is key to ensuring products remain free of damage or defects. Air bearings offer numerous points of control—like our Air turns with their tunable fly height and adjustable web tension. Or, our precision zone Air Bars, which combine positive pressure and vacuum pressure to keep substrates plumb against the guide surface.
Cleanroom Compatibility
More industries than ever have adopted cleanroom protocols as their manufacturing techniques become more precise, and tolerances drop ever lower. For material handling in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries (among many others), air bearings are the ideal choice for handling systems. Our air bearings have been proven to exceed ISO Class 3 standards for cleanroom compliance, and even meet the incredibly stringent guidelines for ISO Class 1.
To learn more about what New Way’s extensive lineup of Frictionless Motion®️ technology can offer the materials handling industry and your specific application, contact us, and we’ll get back to you!
For unparalleled straightness of motion over metal or stone guideways.