Performance of a prototype mechanical face seal with built-in heat pipe is experimentally evaluated. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using phase change to remove frictional heating and thus reduce interfacial temperature. In this design, the heat pipe is integrated into the seal mating ring and there is no need to modify the gland design or the flush arrangement. The experimental results show that by means of phase change, this design is capable of significantly reducing the temperature at the seal rings’ interface. To gain insight into the heat transfer enhancement of the heat pipe mating ring, a one-dimensional steady-state heat transfer analysis is applied to predict the ring wall temperature distribution and to estimate the saturated vapor temperature. The effective thermal conductivity of heat pipe mating ring is estimated. These results of prediction are in good agreement with experimental measurements.
The effectiveness of using textured surfaces on the mechanical face seal mating ring to enhance thermal performance of seal rings was experimentally demonstrated in a recent paper. 1 Further experiments show that the dimples engraved on the primary ring outer surface can also reduce the rings’ contact face temperature. Interestingly, however, when both rings are treated, the seal sets just show slightly better temperature reduction than a single textured ring. An appropriate heat transfer augmentation coefficient is defined and used to estimate the surface heat transfer coefficient of textured mating ring. The surface heat transfer coefficient of textured primary ring is also estimated. To understand the nature of heat transfer of surface texture, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis was carried out using ANSYS Fluent. The turbulent Reynolds stress model was adopted in the analysis with liquid hydrocarbon as the working fluid. The flow structure within a dimple, which demonstrates the working mechanism of dimples’ heat transfer augmentation, is numerically displayed. The thermal performance of dimpled surfaces is evaluated based on the dimples depth-to-diameter ratio, size, arrangement, and shape of dimples. The comparison of Nusselt numbers distribution of dimpled surface and conventional surface is also presented.
A recent experimental investigation revealed that a mechanical face seal with built-in heat pipe can significantly reduce the interfacial contact temperature (Xiao and Khonsari in J Eng Tribol 228(5):498-510, 2014). Further experimental tests are set up to investigate the effect of thermal and lubrication characteristics in a thrustbearing configuration with built-in heat pipes either in the stationary or in the rotating component. During the tests, the rotating disk slides against the stationary disk in an oil reservoir filled with SAE 10 engine oil. Both disks are made of heat-treated stainless steel 17-4 PH with the same hardness. Rubbing face temperature and surface friction coefficient are measured from both the heat pipe and conventional disk pair and the conventional disk pair. The test results show that both the heat pipe stationary and rotating disks are capable of reducing the temperature and friction coefficient.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.