A calculation method on the performance analysis of the thrust aerostatic bearing with vacuum pre-load

Thrust aerostatic bearing with vacuum pre-load (VPL pads) is a kind of effective supporting structure with simple mechanism and well stiffness. In this paper, a calculation method is presented to calculate the static characteristics of the VPL pads. Based on finite difference method (FDM), an efficient iterative algorithm is developed to decrease the iterative times. Compared to the experiment results, it shows that the calculation method can predict the static characteristics exactly.