He founded Bently Nevada Corporation in October, 1961, where he performed pioneering work in the field of instrumentation for measuring the mechanical condition of rotating machinery.
He was the company's president and later CEO until it attained $250 million in annual sales, when he sold it in February, 2002 to GE Energy.
[4] His great-grandfather Benjamin Nye, one of Muscatine County's first settlers, built the Pine Creek Gristmill in 1848.
[11] In June, 1945, all of the Battalion's units but Bently's company were detached for service on Samar island in the Philippines.
He worked at the Rocketdyne division of North American Aviation in California for three years during which he did graduate-level coursework at UC Berkeley and UCLA.
In 1956 Don left Rocketdyne and began experimenting with eddy-current sensing technology and formed Bently Scientific Company.
[24] But Bently's company was the first to successfully commercialize eddy-current proximity transducers, non-contacting displacement sensors measure vibration in high-speed turbomachinery.
[28] The eddy-current proximity probe became the preferred method for assessing vibration and overall mechanical condition on large turbomachinery employing fluid bearings.
[29] Bently Nevada manufactures and sells asset protection and condition monitoring hardware, software and services for industrial plant-wide operations.
[3] The company grew substantially over the years until in 2002 it had 1,200 people at its headquarters in Minden, Nevada, 2,100 employees worldwide, 100 offices in more than 40 countries, and global sales exceeding US$235 million.
[21][30] Its products are used world-wide to monitor the mechanical condition of rotating equipment in a variety of industries including oil and gas production, hydroelectric, wind, hydrocarbon processing, electric power generation, pulp and paper, mining, water and wastewater treatment.
BRDRC's objective was to conduct rotordynamic research, furthering the knowledge of rotating machinery behavior, modeling techniques, and malfunction diagnostic methodologies.
[22]: 30 BRDRC made a number of important contributions to the field of rotordynamics such as a better understanding of fluid-induced instabilities, advanced models for understanding shaft crack behavior, insight into rubbing malfunctions between stationary and rotating parts, and enhancement of the rotordynamic equations via introduction of a new variable lambda (λ) which denoted the fluid circumferential average velocity ratio and more accurately modeled hydrodynamic effects.
Over more than two decades, Bently bought more than 38,000 acres (15,000 ha) of agricultural land in and around Carson Valley, Nevada, part of the former Dangberg Ranch.
[36] In 2018, they converted the store into Bently Ranch Butcher Shop, a retail outlet for their premium beef.
The dam provides irrigation water to more than 1,000 acres (400 ha) of land that are part of Bently Agrowdynamics’ South Ranch.
In 2001, he established ISCORMA, (International Symposium on Stability Control of Rotating Machinery), a bi-annual industry event.
He spent 2½ years studying the area where the oxygen and hydrogen fuel pumps connect to the main engines on the space shuttle following the January 1986 challenger disaster.
[21] All of Bently's businesses were privately held, allowing him to focus on a long-term strategy without the pressure of quarterly stockholder reports.
In July 2020, Christopher and his wife Camille Bently purchased the Kildrummy Estate near Alford, Aberdeenshire in Scotland for around $13.6 million.
In May 2023, Bill Foley, the owner of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights, bought the Minden distillery.
[46] Bently was a leader of and major financial supporter of The Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, D.C., that offers education in statecraft, national security, intelligence, and international affairs.
He paid several million dollars to gut and completely renovate townhouses next door and later donated them to the institute.
In 1995 he received the distinguished research award for achievements in the field of rotating machinery from the Pacific Center of Thermal Fluid Engineering.
The Board of Regents of the university and Community College System of Nevada recognized Bently as a 2002 Distinguished Nevadan.
He was a Foreign Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Engineering in Russia (1992) and a visiting scholar of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (1992).
[18] Bently authored more than 140 papers and articles dealing rotordynamics and/or condition monitoring technologies and was granted two patents.
[34][18] Many of his articles were peer-reviewed and have been published in technical journals like that of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).