• 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.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.643-649
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• 2011

For the development of butterfly valves used in liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels, the seat tightness is one of the important factors to be taken into account in the valve-design process. An O-ring-type metal seal with a retaining ring showing good seat tightness at cryogenic temperatures has been widely used, despite the high manufacturing costs involved. As an alternative, a flexible solid metal seal offers not only sufficient tightness of the butterfly valve, meeting specification requirements, but also relatively low manufacturing costs. In this study, a design criterion to ensure the seat tightness of the butterfly valve using the flexible solid metal seal is proposed. The contact pressure can be calculated by the simulation of the frictional contact behavior between the surface of the metal seal and the valve disc. The geometry of the flexible solid metal seal is determined so that it satisfies the design criterion for sufficient seat tightness, and is verified by experiments according to BS6755 and BS6364.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.9 no.1 s.26
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• pp.26-32
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• 2005

This paper presents the design safety of metal seals in pressure vessels. For a high-pressure vessel, a metal seal is usually used as a primary sealing, and an elastomeric rubber O-ring is adopted as a secondary sealing unit. The FEM computed results show that an aluminium material for sealing a gas leakage is superior to a steel one because of the thermal expansion rate. The deformation and stress distributions on the metal seal and pressure vessel structures are mainly dominated by transferred temperature compared to those of the gas pressure in which is supplied by an external pump. Thus, the temperature of a metal seal material should be restricted to under $200^{\circ}C$.