Steady-State Response of a Flexibly Mounted Stator Mechanical Face Seal Subject to Dynamic Forcing of a Flexible Rotor

Mechanical face seals are constitutive components of much larger turbomachines and require consideration of the system dynamics for successful design. The dynamic interplay between the seal and rotor is intensified by recent trends toward reduced clearances, higher speeds, and more flexible rotors. Here, the “rotor” consists of the flexible shaft and the rotating seal seat. The objective here is to, for the first time, determine how the rotor affects the seal performance and vice versa. Thresholds can then be established beyond which the rotor influences the seal but not vice versa (i.e., the rotordynamics can be sent to the seal analysis as an exogenous input). To this end, a model of a flexibly mounted stator face seal is provided including the coupled dynamics of the flexible rotor. The model accounts for axial and angular deflections of the rotor and seal. Coupled rotordynamics are modeled using a lumped-parameter approach including static and dynamic rotor angular misalignments. For expediency, linearized expressions for fluid forces are used, and the resulting steady-state equations of motion are solved analytically to investigate how rotor inertia, speed, and angular misalignment influence the coupled seal dynamics. Importantly, results from the study reveal that in some operating regimes, neglecting the rotordynamics implies healthy seal operation when instead intermittent rub exists between the faces. This work also shows that when the rotor inertia is much larger than the seal inertia, the rotordynamics can be solved separately and used in the seal model as an external input.