Concept

Levitation — where it appears

Holding an object up without contact, by a force from a field or a fluid that balances its weight. In a squeeze film it is the mean pressure left under an oscillating plate by a gas that cannot escape the gap fast enough to average it away.

Named by 3 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Also named here as stiffness — the same set of essays touches all of them, so they are one junction rather than several.

Where a film stops being a damper and starts being a spring. The stiffness and the damping of a circular gas film against its squeeze number, both in units of ambient pressure times disc area. At the left the stiffness is nothing and the damping is Stefan's incompressible law; at the right the damping has gone and the stiffness has reached π, which is an isothermal gas trapped in the gap with no way out. They cross at σ = 6.23, and neither limit was put in by hand — both fall out of a Bessel function of a complex argument.

A damper that turns into a spring

A film of oil squeezed between two plates resists motion and stores nothing, and that is a property of the oil rather than of the film. Fill the same gap with air and the same equation gives a film that stores and resists nothing — above a squeeze number of six, with nothing changed but the frequency and the gap.

viscous · Squeeze film

Five gas films never meet their thermal crossing. Six air films placed by their squeeze number, which decides whether the gas leaves the gap or is trapped in it, and their thermal number, which decides whether the heat of compression leaves. The dashed diagonal is the estimate that the two differ by the Prandtl number. The devices lie between one and eleven decades below it, because heat leaves across the gap and the gas along the disc. Only the levitator at a twenty-micron gap comes within a decade of the thermal crossing at ωh²/κ ≈ 18.

The heat of a squeeze leaves across the gap

Squeeze a film of air and it warms, and whether that heat reaches the walls in time decides whether the gas is compressed isothermally or adiabatically. The natural estimate has the heat leaving the way the gas does, along the disc, and puts the thermal crossing beside the viscous one. It leaves across the gap instead, a distance hundreds of times shorter, so the crossing sits decades away — and when a film does reach it, what it gains is not stiffness but a second band of loss.

viscous · Squeeze film

Helium wastes least for most stiffnesses; xenon reaches furthest. The film's loss tangent — damping over stiffness — against its stiffness, each gas traced from a tenth of an atmosphere up to the pressure of its greatest stiffness. Raising the pressure buys stiffness and costs loss for every gas. Up to about a hundred newtons per unit relative amplitude helium's film loses least at any stiffness — 0.29 at 50 N against air's 0.4 and xenon's 0.46. Beyond, helium is near its peak of 127 N and the heavy monatomic gases take over: xenon reaches 149 N, and at 120 N loses 0.73 against helium's 0.78.

The gas sets a squeeze film's loss, not its stiffness

A squeeze-film levitator wastes part of every cycle as heat that crosses the gap, and the gas and its pressure decide how much. Fill one levitator with six gases at one atmosphere and its stiffness hardly changes while its loss nearly doubles from helium to xenon. Raise the pressure and every gas stiffens towards a peak near ten atmospheres. Helium wastes least at any stiffness up to a hundred newtons; above that, only the heavy monatomic gases get there.

viscous · Squeeze film

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Compressibility Damping Lubrication film Reynolds equation Squeeze film Stiffness Conduction Dimensionless Dissipation Model limit Thin film Rectification

All concepts