摘要
To assist designers and researchers of gas foil radial bearings in the preliminary design stage, this study proposes a concise and practical method for rapidly evaluating whether a bearing can provide sufficient load capacity at its design lift-off speed. The method integrates insights from multiple prior studies and addresses the common limitation of insufficient design-stage information. The proposed approach requires only a minimal set of readily accessible parameters: the dynamic viscosity of the working medium, the desired lift-off speed, the shaft diameter, the ambient pressure, and the ambient temperature. Unlike conventional analyses, it eliminates the need for parameters that are difficult to obtain before the bearing design is finalized, such as the average radial clearance of the thin gas film between the shaft and the top foil. To validate the method, one bearing prototypes were designed based on this framework. Their performance was analyzed through three-dimensional fluid–structure interaction finite element simulations and further verified using an in-house experimental bench to measure lift-off speeds under applied loads. The experimental results showed strong agreement with the predictions of the proposed method, confirming its reliability and applicability for early-stage design. © 2026, Avestia Publishing. All rights reserved.