Air Bearings How do they work? Example XY Air Bearing Stage, PIglide XY-Table

Air Bearings: How do they work? See high precision XY-table example video. www.pi-usa.us/...
Air bearings provide very smooth and accurate motion They can be used in linear and rotary motion systems. XY-air bearing stages with the highest motion fidelity are based on a planar air bearing design driven by linear motors.
Air Bearing Stage articles: www.pi-usa.us/...
Air bearing stages provide extremely straight and flat XY motion. Air bearing stages are used wafer inspection and scribing applications, as well as other ultra-precision motion applications such as flat panel inspection.
The cross-beam mounts to the Y axis via a highly engineered flexural coupling that provides yaw-compliance without sacrificing system stiffness. The gantry axis is a dual air-bearing design that incorporates dual linear motors and dual linear encoders. Ironless linear motors provide smooth motion and no cogging or attractive forces. Both incremental and absolute encoder options are available. The PIglide HS incorporates three high-accuracy linear encoders, one for the bridge axis and two for the gantry axis. For Gantry robots see: www.pi-usa.us/...
XY-Stage overview: www.pi-usa.us/...

[@GoalOrientedLifting]

This is an amazing way to do the xyz gantry. But would a flooding system, with coolant, affect the machine in any way?

[@August301989]

Is it noisy?

[@SuhasGundale]

Great

[@marlonsaveri]

At 0:27, why a vacuum area is necessary? Is there any problem about when it works without vacuum (or, with just one Air Inlet?)

[@nanopositioning]

Vacuum is used for preloading.

[@marlonsaveri]

Thanks. After this I read some comments at your site and I adapted a list about vacuum advantages:
- Using vacuum, One does not need using opposing air bearings on parallel surfaces.
- Incremental stiffness with a light load,
- Adjustment of air film thickness can be used for focusing, squaring and sub-micro inch vertical positioning,
- height of the bearing does not fluctuate when in transition, and it is naturally stable.
It seems to me that, if I just want something to move a heavy granite block over another granite surface, maybe I don't need vacuum at such air bearings, right?

[@nanopositioning]

Correct, just as with an air hockey table. The vacuum is there to increase the stiffness and keep the air film very constant

[@Chaos------]

I could see this being used for say component placement on pcb's but you cant introduce any sort of load on the gantry. Which seriously restricts its usefulness.

[@Skooteh]

Why couldn't you load the gantry? Air bearings are already used on CNC spindles and on axis motion for some machines. They work fine under reasonable loads.

[@GZWA]

step above ceramic for sure.