Development of foil thrust bearings with simple structure for micro turbines

Because of the low power loss and high stability, foil bearings are suitable lubrication components for high speed rotational systems. At present, the foil bearings used in actual applications almost have complicated structure and are hard to manufacture. In this paper, two kinds of foil thrust bearings with simple structure are presented. Configurations of these two foil thrust bearings are introduced; meanwhile, the load capacity and running stability are also tested in a high speed micro turbine. It is shown that viscoelastic supported foil thrust bearing has higher load capacity and hemisphere convex dots supported foil thrust bearing is more stable in high speed operational condition.