In this paper, we describe the film thickness and
pressure measurement of the optimized thrust air
bearing. In our recent study, a new optimization
technique of the bearing groove geometry of the
hydrodynamic thrust air bearings was proposed and a
new groove geometry having a bending curve in outer
vicinity of the bearing surface was obtained.
Furthermore, in this study, the drastic improvement of
the bearing dynamic stiffness was verified by the
dynamic characteristic experiment using the original
high-speed bearing test rig. However the relative error
of the film thickness between the theory and experiment
is large compared with that of dynamic stiffness.
Consequently, it has been considered that the
improvement of the measurement accuracy for film
thickness is one of the most important problems. On the
other hand, the generation of the negative pressure on
the optimized bearing surface has not been confirmed
experimentally, and it is also important to verify the
negative pressure generation by measurement.
Therefore, in this study, we examined the improvement
of the measurement accuracy of the film thickness and
the pressure measurement of the optimized bearing. As
a result, the accuracy of air film thickness is drastically improved applying a newly proposed compensation method and the negative pressure on the optimized bearing can be found experimentally
