Experimental investigation on the performance of aerodynamic compliant foil air bearings

Compliant foil air bearings have been successfully applied to a wide range of high-speed rotating machinery. It is very important to investigate the performance of this type of bearings. This paper describes an experimental identification into the static and dynamic performance of compliant foil air bearing. A multifunctional test rig is built and the test apparatus are introduced in detailed. The association of the bearing load capacity with the rotating speed and bearing eccentricity are studied by experimental measure. The dynamic stiffness and damping coefficients are calculated based on the experimental measures for a wide range of excitation frequency. The effect of the excitation frequency on these dynamic coefficients is also examined. The results are compared to those presented in published papers.