Manufacturing of cast monolithic hydrostatic journal bearings

In this work a self-compensating hydrostatic journal bearing design, which eliminates all but one precision-manufacturing step, was manufactured and tested. Novel manufacturing methods for different sizes are introduced. The bearing sensitivity to manufacturing errors was analyzed computationally using statistical methods. These results were used to show that the introduced manufacturing methods are more cost effective than the traditional precision manufacturing methods for hydrostatic bearings, even when the performance variation is taken into account. Manufactured bearings were tested and the experimental results were compared with theoretical results and satisfactory agreement was achieved.