Analysis of the Static Performance of a Cableless Aerostatic Guideway

To develop an innovative aerostatic guideway without cable drag force that can be widely applied to ultra-precision machining and measurement technology, it is necessary to analyze the static performance of the aerostatic guideway. The structural properties of the cableless aerostatic guideway, i.e., the bearing capacity and internal pressure distribution, directly affect the accuracy of processing and measurement. In this work, the relevant flow equations of the cableless aerostatic guideway are established by considering the unbalanced micro-scale air film. Moreover, the finite difference method is used to solve the calculation of the global analysis of air film at different positions. In addition, this work compares and analyzes the pressure and fluid velocity vector distributions in balanced and unbalanced states and investigates the effect of varying the thicknesses of the air film on static characteristics such as bearing capacity and stiffness. By comparing the balanced and unbalanced states under the same conditions, the obtained results show that in the unbalanced situation, the bearing capacity is lower by 11.69 percent and the stiffness is slightly higher (by 16.67 percent). Furthermore, the related experiments verify the predicted dependence of the bearing capacity on the thickness of the air film, and further demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed structure of the cableless aerostatic guideway. This work provides a technical reference for the design of a cableless aerostatic guideway.