Analysis and experimental study on a novel gas foil bearing with nested compression springs

This paper presents a theoretical analysis and experimental study on a novel nested compression spring gas foil bearing (NSFB), which uses a layer of springs as elastic support structure. The stiffness and damping of the support structure can be easily controlled by adjusting the spring number and diameter. Reducing the stiffness of the springs at both ends of the NSFB significantly improves bearing load capacity. The direct stiffness and damping coefficients of NSFB with 39 and 47 springs are much larger than those of NSFB with 31 springs. Experiments were conducted to investigate the start-stop characteristic, the stiffness and damping performance of NSFB. As the spring number increased from 31 to 47, both the linear stiffness and loss factor increased.