An aerostatic bearing device with arrayed restrictors for roll-to-roll printed electronics

High precision overlay alignment is of great importance to guarantee the quality of Roll-to-Roll printed electronics (R2RPE) products. Aiming at removing machining and assembling errors of the roller with both support and transport uses, an aerostatic bearing device with arrayed restrictors is proposed. In this paper the design of the whole device is presented. The mathematical model of the air film existed between the flexible substrate and the aerostatic bearing device is given by adopting simplified Navier-Stokes equations. In order to modeling the pressure distribution of the air film, numerical simulation is processed with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software FLUENT. Load capacity curve and stiffness cure are generated to optimize the size and distribution of restrictors on the device. The simulation results indicate that: 1) air film with homogeneous pressure distribution is obtained from the designed arrayed restrictors; 2) diameter of the restrictors has a major influence on load capacity and stiffness when the number of the restrictors reaches a certain quantity.