Keynote at the 14th Conference on Advanced Gas Lubrication - China

Efforts toward downscaling turbomachinery show promising results and open opportunities for a more sustainable energy landscape. These advancements have opened up a range of new possibilities for applications that were previously only feasible with positive displacement machines, such as fuel cell and domestic scale heat pump compressors, organic Rankine cycle turbines, or small-scale gas turbine engines. These novel machines are oil-free, silent, require no maintenance, improve efficiency and increase the power density by one order of magnitudecompared to the state-of-the-art. However, the high rotor speeds, the high power density, and the small scale pose significant technological challenges. In this presentation, we will offer insights into addressing these challenges with grooved gas-lubricated bearings and how we model them. Further, we give insights into approaches to designing high-speed rotors for small-scale turbomachiner