Brush seal is widely applied on turbomachinery to control leakage flow between the stationary and rotational components due to its high sealing performance. Considering the axial compression of the bristle pack posing a challenge to accurately predict the leakage flow rate at the practical operating condition, the 3D staggered tube bundle model is established based on the multi-block structured mesh. The mesh motion technique is used to obtain the leakage flow pattern and aerodynamic resistance performance of the brush seal. The effects of pressure ratio , sealing clearance  and longitudinal pitch reduction  on leakage flow characteristics as well as  of the brush seal were investigated. The numerical results were in well agreement with the experimental data, thus the accuracy of the presented numerical method was validated. For the contacting brush seal,  has a significant effect on the leakage flow rate reduction. As the  increases from 0mm to 0.004mm, the leakage flow rate is reduced by 39.63% when  equals to 1.5. For the clearance brush seal, has little effect on the leakage flow rate reduction. As the increases from 0mm to 0.004mm, the leakage flow rate is reduced by 3.44% when  equals to 1.5 and  equals to 0.2mm. As for the aerodynamic resistance, the presence of the sealing clearance could effectively convert the pressure energy of the leakage flow into kinetic energy. This causes that the leakage flow velocity exiting the bristle pack of the clearance brush seal is 1.5 to 2.0 times than that of the contacting brush seal. Although the existence of the sealing clearance obviously increases the leakage flow rate, it effectively reduces the aerodynamic forces acting on the bristles. This research would provide a technical support for the analysis of the leakage flow characteristics of the brush seal.


Numerical Investigations on the Leakage Flow Characteristics of Brush Seal Based on the 3D Staggered Tube Bundle Model

Division / Sponsor:
International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/GT2020/volume/84058

Turbo Expo - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.