Improving thermal performance of mechanical seals via surface texturing

Abstract

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.

Influence of Cavitation on the Heat Transfer of High-Speed Mechanical Seal with Textured Side Wall

“…Recently, processing texture on the side wall of seal rings has attracted attention due to its good heat transfer performance and small resistance loss [14][15][16]. Some researchers [17,18] set textures of different shapes and different arrangements on a plate, measured the temperature and velocity distribution inside the texture through experiments and found a slight variance in temperature distribution between different cases with similar Nusselt numbers (Nu number).…”

“…Their experimental results showed that this technology can reduce the temperature of the seal face by about 10% at low speed and pressure. Subsequently, they [15] studied the influence of texture arrangement and geometric parameters on heat transfer enhancement at low speed and found that small-sized textures with a dense arrangement are better. Zhou et al [16] studied the heat transfer effect of various textures.…”

Experimental research on piston rings with different end face structures

“…The test results showed that the friction was significantly reduced by optimizing the texture size compared with the traditional seal ring, but the effect of the texture treatment on the leakage of the seal ring was not mentioned. Xiao et al 20,21 proved the feasibility of adopting dimples in the sealing ring to reduce the sealing temperature through experiments, but did not mention the influence of dimples on the leakage of the seal. Gronitzki and Poll 22 optimized the friction and wear performance by improving the seal ring geometry, and the results showed that the power loss of the seal ring can often be reduced by more than half, but did not mention the effect of the improved geometry of the seal ring on the leakage volume that can reduce the temperature Influence.…”