Research On Structure Desin And Sealing Performance Of New Style Thick Wall Aluminum Honeycomb Seals

Honeycomb seals is a kind of high efficient non-contact seal, which with leakage decline, water removing and seal flow exciting vibration reducing functions. However, the traditional steel honeycomb seals can't be used in machineries with inflammable and explosive medium, because of the collision sparks between rotor and seals. Thanks to the soft material, energy is mainly exhausted by metal deformation and there are few metal fragments when rotor collide with aluminum honeycomb seals, so this new seals is a favorable solution to sparks problem. The structure of aluminum honeycomb seals needs to be redesigned in consideration of strength requirement, meanwhile, the sealing performance of it would change correspondingly. This paper finished the following tasks with numerical methods from the aspects of aluminum honeycomb seals structure and sealing performance.(1)The minimum wall. thickness of aluminum honeycomb seals was determined by using ANSYS software according to machine design handbook. Result shows that the wall thickness should not be less than 0.5mm in order to get enough structural strength to resist sealing pressure. (2)The CFX software was used to study how the single change of wall thickness and how the joint change of wall thickness, honeycomb opposite edges distance and honeycomb depth influenced its sealing performance. Meanwhile, analysis from the perspective of sealing pressure drop explained why the difference of those parameters above would cause the changing of aluminum honeycomb seals'leakage. Results show that the leakage of aluminum honeycomb seals increase with wall thickness increasing, since its pressure drop decrease with it; different optimal ratios of honeycomb depth and honeycomb opposite edges distance are suitable for the aluminum honeycomb seals with different wall thicknesses, aiming at reducing their leakage to minimum.(3)How the leakage of aluminum honeycomb seals varies with seal clearance, honeycomb cells arrangement direction, high-low honeycomb cells structure and seal length were researched separately. Results show that the leakage has a almost linear decrease with the decline of sealing clearance; the honeycomb cells arrangement direction after cells rotate 90 degree comparing to general condition make the leakage decrease slightly, but this influence weakens with the honeycomb opposite edges distance increasing; the sealing performance is not obviously enhanced by high-low honeycomb cells structure, compared with constant depth condition; the leakage minish linearly with sealing length increasing, and this effect decreases when sealing length is quite long already.