Oil-Free Machinery® Foil Bearings Technology

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For over 20 years, our engineers have worked with beam spring journals bearings and optimized them around minimizing the complex manual steps that characterize other foil bearings.  No welds and no "false" precision crimping.  We can train any typical technician to assemble our bearings into Oil-Free Machinery™.  

Making 1 a working prototype is easy.  We appreciate the challenges to make a mass production ready design.  Our large volume manufacturing experience is unique.

With fully developed foil bearings used in real Oil-Free Machinery® from 15.5 mm to 130 mm journals, with matched thrust bearings, we probably have a solution ready for you.  

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, such as in a vehicle application.  Or earthquake. Or compressor surge.  Or thermal transient.  The list goes on...

The beam springs are designed so that at maximum permitted travel, they will not yield.  This way, you have the same bearing before and after the transient event.  This is why advertising a journal bearing load capacity can be meaningless.  We consider our bearings to be near-infinite load capacity, limited by the steel cartridge, not the foil spring.

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, is that just a convenient value to look good on paper when selling bearings?  Is Load Capacity a performance metric you will utilize?