Effect of Foil Geometry on the Static Performance of Thrust Foil Bearings

Gas foil bearings can operate in extreme conditions such as high temperature and high rotating speed, compared to traditional bearings. They also provide better damping and stability characteristics and have larger tolerance to debris and rotor misalignment. Gas foil bearings have been successfully applied to micro- and small-sized turbomachinery, such as microgas turbine and cryogenic turbo expander. In the last decades, a lot of theoretical and experimental work has been conducted to investigate the properties of gas foil bearings. However, very little work has been done to study the influence of the foil bearing pad configuration. This study proposes a robust approach to analyze the effect of the foil geometry on the performance of a six-pad thrust foil bearing. In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for a parallel six-pad thrust foil bearing is created. In order to predict the thermal property, the total energy with viscous dissipation is used. Based on this model, the geometry of the thrust foil bearing is parameterized and analyzed using the design of experiments (DOE) methodology. In this paper, the selected geometry parameters of the foil structure include minimum film thickness, inlet film thickness, the ramp extent on the inner circle, the ramp extent on the outer circle, the arc extent of the pad, and the orientation of the leading edge. The objectives in the sensitivity study are load capacity and maximal temperature. An optimal foil geometry is derived based on the results of the DOE process by using a goal-driven optimization technique to maximize the load capacity and minimize the maximal temperature. The results show that the geometry of the foil structure is a key factor for foil bearing performance. The numerical approach proposed in this study is expected to be useful from the thrust foil bearing design perspective.