Highly deformable hydrostatic bearings using a single closed fluid cell

The applications where fluid film bearings are used to guide high loads over wavy surfaces are limited. This because current designs of fluid film bearings often consist either of rigid embodiments that are unable to adapt to varying surface curvatures to form the required thin fluid film, or of compliant designs that have been designed to allow only for small deformations. This work discusses the requirements to design highly deformable fluid film bearings and introduces two metrics to compare their performance. Additionally, it introduces a compliant cell that is filled with an incompressible fluid as a design element to obtain both a high load capacity and sufficient deformability for such bearings. This closed fluid cell is also implemented in a 2D axi-symmetric hydrostatic bearing concept, that is numerically modelled and validated by experiments with a prototype. The simulations and prototype show that it is able to operate on surfaces with a hundred times higher curvature than has been analysed in previous studies.