• 대한기계학회논문집A
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• 제25권6호
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• pp.916-922
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• 2001

A mechanical face seal is a tribo-element intended to control leakage of working fluid at the interface between a rotating shaft and its housing. Leakage of working fluid decreases drastically as the clearance of the mating seal faces gets smaller. But the very small seal clearance results in an increased reduction of seal life because of high wear and heat generation. Therefore, in the design of mechanical face seals a compromise between low leakage and acceptable seal life is important, and it presents a difficult and practical design problem. A fluid film or sealing dam geometry of the seal clearance affects seal lubrication performance very much, and thereby it is one of the main design considerations. In this study the Reynolds equation for the sealing dam of mechanical face seals is numerically analyzed, using the Galerkin finite element method, which is readily applied to various seal geometries. Film pressures of the sealing dam are analyzed, including the effects of the seal face coning and tilt. Then, lubrication performances of the seals, such as opening forces, restoring moments, leakage, and dynamic coefficients, are calculated, and they are compared to the results obtained by the narrow seal approximation.

• 대한기계학회논문집A
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• 제24권12호
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• pp.2989-2994
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• 2000

A mechanical face seal is a tribo-element intended to control leakage of working fluid at the interface of a rotating shaft and its housing. Leakage of working fluid decreases drastically as the clearance between mating seal faces gets smaller. But the very small clearance may result in an increased reduction of seal life because of high wear and heat generation. Therefore, in the design of mechanical face seals a compromise between low leakage and acceptable seal life is important, ant it present a difficult and practical design problem. A fluid film or sealing dam geometry of the seal clearance affects seal lubrication performance very much, and thereby is optimization is one of the main design consideration. in this study the Reynolds equation for the sealing dam of mechanical face seals is numerically analyzed, using the Galerkin finite element method, which is readily applied to various seal geometries, to give lubrication performances, such as opening force, restoring moment, leakage, and axial and angular stiffness coefficients. Then, to improve the seal performance an optimization is performed, considering various design variables simultaneously. For the tested case the optimization ha successfully resulted in the optimal design values of outer and inner seal radii, coning, seal clearance, and balance radius while satisfying all the operation subjected constraints and design variable side-constraints, and improvements of axial and angular stiffness coefficients by 16.8% and 2.4% respectively and reduction of leakage by 38.4% have been achieved.