A combined numerical-experimental model of air foil bearing compliant structure

The paper concerns the development process of numerical-experimental model of air foil bearing compliant structure. Theoretically, static and dynamic characteristics of the foil bearing are the result of elastic combined properties of the two serially connected elements. One of them is a thin gas film of very small thickness and relatively high static and dynamic stiffness. The second elastic element is a pretensioned bump foil spring. This paper focuses on the properties of compliant foil structure and leaves aside the gas film behavior. At the beginning of the model development, the global stiffness and damping properties of compliant structure were obtained from the test stand measurements. In the next step, some assumptions concerning the model were made. The main one was the replacememy of the single bumps of the corrugated foil by the set of elastic-damping numerical elements. At last, the fine-tuning of the model was carried out. The tuning involved changing of subelements local damping and stiffness properties, which in effect influenced the global properties of foil bearing. The tuning criterion for the model was defined as follows: the bearing global stiffness and damping properties of the model should not differ from the experimentally obtained values more than 10%.