Oil-Free Machinery® Technology
Foil Bearings Technology
Mass Production Ready
Design and Test for conventional and oil-free turbomachinery
View Bearing Catalog30+ Years of Hands-On R&D
For over 30 years, our engineers have worked with beam spring journal bearings and optimized them around minimizing the complex manual steps that characterize other foil bearings. No welds and no "false precision" of crimping. We can train any typical technician to assemble our bearings into Oil-Free Machinery™.
Making a working prototype is easy with tool maker tolerances and hand matched parts and a limited operating life. We live up to the challenges to make a mass production ready design. Our large volume manufacturing experience is unique in the industry, with customers making turbines, blowers, and compressors in the 10's of thousands.
Yield-Proof Springs - Infinite Load Capacity
If your bearings come with a load capacity rating, ask what happens if you exceed it — and then decide if that is really a load limit or a life limit.
Traditional bump springs used in journal bearings will yield when you have high rotor motion. Sometimes this is inevitable — in a vehicle application, earthquake, compressor surge, or thermal transient. The list goes on.
Our beam springs are designed so that at maximum permitted travel, they will not yield. This means you have the same bearing before and after the transient event. We consider our bearings to be near-infinite load capacity, limited by the steel cartridge — not the foil spring.
System Level Understanding
Our bearings are designed with system integration in mind for optimized Oil-Free Machinery™. We do not promote any single metric as outstanding, but we do promote that as a system, we are incredibly robust.
If your bearing vendor is promoting journal bearing load capacity over other bearing integration metrics, ask yourself: is that just a convenient value to look good on paper? Is load capacity a performance metric you will actually utilize in your application?
Why Choose OFM Foil Bearings?
No Welds, No False Precision
Our beam spring journal bearings are optimized around minimizing the complex manual steps that characterize other foil bearings. No welds and no "false precision" crimping. Any typical technician can be trained to assemble our bearings into Oil-Free Machinery™.
Mass Production Ready
Making one working prototype is easy. We appreciate the challenges of making a mass-production-ready design. Our large-volume manufacturing experience is unique in the industry.
Full Size Range Available
With fully developed foil bearings used in real Oil-Free Machinery® from 15.5 mm to 130 mm journals, with matched thrust bearings from 26 mm to 230 mm, we probably have a solution ready for you.
Bearing Catalog
Browse our current list of developed Oil-Free Machinery® bearing sets. Click to view the full catalog or download for offline reference.
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Download Bearing List insteadReady to Find Your Bearing?
View our list of developed Oil-Free Machinery® bearing sets, or contact us to discuss your specific application.