PI's compact planar XY air bearing stage at Photonics West

PI designs and manufactures all air bearing products in the USA. PI's engineering team has more than 200 man years of air bearing design experience. In addition to customised systems for OEMs, PI offers a substantial standard product line of air bearing stages that includes motorised and non-motorised, linear, rotary, spherical, X/XY, voice coil, compact, and large-scale systems, as a complement to the existing comprehensive range of piezo nano positioning stages, traditional motorised positioners and hexapod 6-axis parallel positioning systems. The addition of air bearing technology means that PI covers the whole motion range from finger-tip sized nano-positioners to large-scale stages with long travel ranges, through a plethora of different drives and guiding systems that can be tailored to meet the needs of an OEM or customer.

Air bearings replace mechanical contact by a thin air film. The fully preloaded air bearings in the A-311 PIglide IS provide frictionless motion, resulting in negligible hysteresis or reversal error, and zero-wear of mechanical components. Due to the air bearing's surface averaging effect, pitch/yaw/roll and straightness/flatness are significantly better than with conventional mechanical bearings, motion is vibration-free, and velocity can be controlled at very high constancy.

PI, a 2016 Photonics Prism Award finalist with its Fast Multi-Axis Photonics Alignment system, will also showcase innovative nanopositioning stages, piezo, voice coil and linear motors, hexapod 6-axis parallel positioning systems, beam steering and fiber alignment equipment. Talk to a PI Engineer at booth #4829, or go to www.pi-usa.us for more information about the A-311 PIglide IS Series compact, planar XY air bearing stage, and watch a video at www.youtube.com/embed/_0frYXPpLEw?rel=0.