• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.76-82
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• 1998

Sealing an oil-air mixture plays important roles to have an enhanced lubrication for high speed spindle. Current work is emphasized 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 is injected against through the leakage flow. It has a combined geometry of a protective collar type and an air jet type. In this study, both of a numerical analysis by CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) and experimental measurements are carried out to verify sealing improvement. Both of the turbulence and the compressible flow model are introduced in CFD analysis. The sealing effect of the leakage clearance and the air jet magnitude are studied for various parameter in the experiment. The results of pressure drop in the experiment match reasonably to those of the simulation by introducing a flow coefficient. Effects of sealing improvement are explained as decreasing of effective leakage clearance by air jetting. Thus, sealing effect is improved by amount of air jetting even though clearance becomes larger.