Design and Research of Symmetrical Multi-Throttle Thrust Hydrostatic Bearing Based on Comparative Analysis of Various Meshes

Abstract

Due to the advantages of high rotation accuracy and long life, hydrostatic air bearings are widely used in precision rotation equipment, such as machine tools and turntables. It is imperative to reasonably design the structural size of the bearing, especially as the size of the bearing in the precision turntable determines the bearing capacity of the turntable. At present, commercial CFD software is used chiefly for simulation verification for the design of air bearings. The mesh divided in the simulation calculation has a significant impact on the efficiency of the calculation and determines the accuracy of the final simulation results. Therefore, this paper takes the symmetrical multi-throttle thrust bearing in the precision turntable as the research object and compares and studies the advantages and disadvantages of sliced structured meshes, continuous structured meshes, and unstructured meshes. On this basis, simulation analysis of bearing capacity for different radial equalizing groove lengths, widths, and depths and explores the influence of the structure size of the thrust bearing on its bearing capacity. The study shows that the length and depth of the throttle groove significantly influence the bearing capacity, while the width has little influence on the bearing capacity. Therefore, under the specific cavity volume to ensure the dynamic characteristics of the bearing, the width of the throttling groove should be reduced first, and the length and depth of the throttling groove should be increased to improve the bearing capacity.