• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.537-545
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• 2013

The elastic recovery of a metal seal is a factor that can be used to assess its sealing performance. In this study, a compliant mechanism topology optimization has been performed to find a structure of a metal O-ring seal that can maintain excellent sealing performance with a maximized elastic recovery over extended operation. An evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) was used as a topology optimization algorithm with two different types of objective functions considering both flexibility and stiffness. In particular, a circular design domain was adopted to consider the outer shape of the metal O-ring seal. The elastic recovery of the optimal topology was calculated and compared to that of a commercial product.