Research status and developing trends of gas bearing in recent years

Abstract

As one kind of support elements for rotational machines, gas bearings that use air or gas as lubricant, have many attractive advantages such as low power loss, wide work temperature range, high rotating speed and low maintenance cost. However, gas bearings also have some disadvantages including low carrying load at low speed, wear at start-stop procedure, not easy to predict bearing performance due to the complex bearing structure and so on.The purpose of this paper is to explore the research status of gas bearing based on the Web of Science datasets and related tools, meanwhile, the developing trends emerged in gas bearing are further studied. The results shows that: 1) the top ten productive countries published 85% papers in the studies of gas bearing; 2) there are eight research clusters emerged in the topics analysis visualization and the top three largest clusters are #1 metal mesh foil bearing, #1 bump-type foil bearing and #2 aerostatic thrust bearing respectively; 3) Comparing to other research topics, foil bearings (metal mesh type and bump type)and aerostatic thrust bearing may be further explored in the future. This study presents intuitive state of research of gas bearings and proposes a fresh perspective for relevant researchers to perform research in the future.