Hydraulic machinery is widely used in delivering solid-liquid mixing medium. The abrasion and destruction caused by sediment particles occurs on the contact interface between the contacting seal elements, which has a considerable influence on the operational stability and safety.
Helical groove seal is a type of non-contacting dynamic seal. Relied on the reversed pressure produced by the rotary sealing element, the helical groove seal could reduce or prevent the leakage. Such seal has a good performance even if there is a big clearance between the sealing elements, so helical groove seal has its unique advantage on solid-liquid mixing medium. However, the study of helical groove seal on solid-liquid mixing flow is very poor.
In this paper, the certain conception and theoretical study of helical groove seal was introduced. With the commercial software FLUENT, the 3D internal flow of the seal was presented by using multiphase flow model. Based on the method of single variable model, the seals with different helical parameters were calculated to compare the characteristics of solid-liquid two phases flow in helical groove seals with different parameters, for example, the clearance and spiral groove depth. By this way, the relationship between structure and performance of particles-mixed helical groove seals is showed clearly, then the results can be used for design of helical groove seal structure.
