An Experimental Study on Sealing Improvements of Non-Contact Type Seal for Oil Mist Lubrication

Sealing an oil-air mixture plays important roles to have an enhanced lubrication for high speed spindle. High speed spindle requires non-contact type of sealing mechanism. Current work emphases on the investigation of the air jet effect on the protective collar type labyrinth seal. To improve the sealing capability of conventional labyrinth seal, air jet was injected against through the leakage flow, It has a combined geometry of a protective collar type and an air jet type. Both of a numerical analysis by CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and experimental measurements are carried out to verify sealing improvement The sealing effects of the leakage clearance and the air jet magnitude are studied in various parameters. The results of pressure drop in the experiment match reasonably to those of the simulation by introducing a flow coefficient Effect of sealing improvement is explained as decreasing of leakage clearance by air jetting. Thus, sealing effect is improved by amount of air jetting even though clearance becomes larger.