Aerostatic shallow-pocket thrust bearing

Load capacity, stiffness and flow for an aerostatic shallow-pocket thrust bearing, from the pocket and land pressure profiles. Unlocked from the legacy demo gate; general in its geometry.

✓ validated against legacyoriginal: /calculators/c12_4f.htm

Outer diameter, D₀mmPocket outer diameter, D₁mmFeed diameter, D₂mmLand film thickness, h₀µmPocket depth + film, h₂µmSupply pressure, pₛMPaAmbient pressure, pₐMPa

Load capacity, F240.7 N

Load coefficient, F̄0.479

Stiffness, S48.1 N/µm

Pressure ratio, pᵣ/pₐ3.029

Design pressure ratio, β0.507

Mass flow, ṁ7.905 mg/s

Volume flow, Q0.399 l/min

Unlocked from the legacy "register" gate, which only froze the geometry. The formula is faithful and now general for any pocket/land geometry.

Method & references

Aerostatic shallow-pocket thrust bearing; pocket and land pressure integration.
Stiffness by finite difference on the recess pressure. Demo lock removed; formula unchanged.

The computation is a literal port of the original client-side JavaScript from /calculators/c12_4f.htm. Results are verified equal to the original by an automated golden-master test. No formula has been re-derived or “improved”.