Effects of tooth bending damage on the leakage performance and rotordynamic coefficients of labyrinth seals

Tooth bending damage resulting from an intense impact by the rotor sometimes occurs in the transient operation.To investigate the influence of after-damage clearance and tooth bending length on the leakage performance and rotordynamic coefficients of labyrinth seals,three tooth bending damages were taken into consideration,including the unbent tooth damage(abbreviated as Unbent),the partial tooth bending damage(abbreviated as Pbent)and the complete tooth bending damage(abbreviated as Cbent).The transient CFD solution was utilized to calculate the leakage flow rates and rotordynamic coefficients of labyrinth seals with clearances of 0.3,0.4,0.5,0.6 mm for three tooth bending damages.The obtained result shows that the Unbent tooth damage leaks least while the Pbent tooth bending damage leaks most,and an increase of 6.1%for Cbent tooth bending damage and an increase of 19.4%for Pbent tooth bending damage are discovered at the tooth clearance of 0.6 mm in comparison with the Unbent tooth damage.Compared to the Unbent tooth damage,the effective damping for Pbent tooth bending damage and Cbent tooth bending damage is lower and drops by 9.7%–33.6%and 8.5%–22.6%respectively at the tooth clearance of 0.6 mm,suggesting that Pbent tooth bending damage or Cbent tooth bending damage tends to weaken the seal stability when compared to the Unbent tooth damage.

Numerical simulation on rotordynamic characteristics of annular seal under uniform and non-uniform flows

Currently, the flow field of annular seals disturbed by the circular whirl motion of rotors is usually solved using computational fluid dynamics(CFD) to evaluate the five rotordynamic coefficients. The simulations are based on the traditional quasi-steady method. In this work, an improved quasi-steady method along with the transient method was presented to compute the rotordynamic coefficients of a long seal. By comparisons with experimental data, the shortcomings of quasi-steady methods have been identified. Then, the effects of non-uniform incoming flow on seal dynamic coefficients were studied by transient simulations. Results indicate that the long seal has large cross stiffness k and direct mass M which are not good for rotor stability, while the transient method is more suitable for the long seal for its excellent performance in predicting M. When the incoming flow is non-uniform, the stiffness coefficients vary with the eccentric directions. Based on the rotordynamic coefficients under uniform incoming flow, the linearized fluid force formulas, which can consider the effects of non-uniform incoming flow, have been presented and can well explain the varying-stiffness phenomenon.