Standard fluid film bearings are rigid and designed to operate with fixed surface geometries and curvatures. Introducing compliance in these bearings may extend their application range by allowing the bearing to adapt to wavy counter surfaces with a non-uniform curvature. As a result of this compliance, however, the film pressure might influence the bearing deformation. Despite existing solutions that have been proposed in literature, it remains a challenge to maintain a near-constant and efficient film profile under varying loads on functionally wavy surfaces. This work therefore presents a new design approach with a load-distributing support, based on the principle of pressure profile matching, to better control the deformability in these bearings. The fundamental working principle of this approach is shown and analyzed in a hydrostatic bearing. For this, an elasto-hydrostatic lubrication model is presented that combines the essential fluid-film and elastic behavior. The results show that, even with a limited number of distributed support forces, the approach maintains an improved performance on larger curvature variations. Based on these results, a practically usable range of the critical, non-dimensional design parameters is identified.

The applications where fluid film bearings are used to guide high loads over wavy surfaces are limited. This because current designs of fluid film bearings often consist either of rigid embodiments that are unable to adapt to varying surface curvatures to form the required thin fluid film, or of compliant designs that have been designed to allow only for small deformations. This work discusses the requirements to design highly deformable fluid film bearings and introduces two metrics to compare their performance. Additionally, it introduces a compliant cell that is filled with an incompressible fluid as a design element to obtain both a high load capacity and sufficient deformability for such bearings. This closed fluid cell is also implemented in a 2D axi-symmetric hydrostatic bearing concept, that is numerically modelled and validated by experiments with a prototype. The simulations and prototype show that it is able to operate on surfaces with a hundred times higher curvature than has been analysed in previous studies.