<p>It is difficult to suppress self-excited micro-vibrations of aerostatic flat bearings with traditional pocketed orifice-type restrictors, partially due to the sharp change of the airflow direction. In this paper, a vortex-type restrictor is proposed. Instead of the pocketed orifice-type restrictor with an orifice perpendicular to the guideway, two orifices parallel to the guideway are utilized to create a vortex within the pocket. The pressure depression phenomenon can be suppressed and the airflow velocity can be reduced according to numerical simulation results, and experimental results demonstrate that the micro-vibration of the aerostatic bearing with the vortex-type restrictors can be reduced significantly at low film thicknesses and the load carrying capacity and stiffness are improved as well compared to the aerostatic bearing with the pocketed orifice-type restrictors.</p>