Abstract
Labyrinth seal is a kind of untouched dynamical seal which is commonly used in turbo-machinery to reduce the leakage loss. It is a well known problem that seals induce fluid forces on the rotor which can excite rotor vibrations and thereby destabilize the machine. So it is vital important to simulate the gas flow and pressure distribution inside labyrinth seal in order to deeply study the destabilization mechanism and the influence factors.
The flow inside labyrinth seal obeys all the conservation equations of fluid flow for mass, momentum and energy. So the commercial CFD software Fluent was used to simulate and analysis the compressible gas flow inside the seal for the see-through labyrinth seal. So the total works in this paper are as follows:
The finite element model for the flow inside labyrinth seal was established, division grid and establishes the boundary condition; mass flow rate under the condition of various different pressure ratio and tooth clearance was calculated by Fluent.
Keywords: Labyrinth seal FLUENT Finite element model Leakage