Considering that the actual seal is not a full-film lubrication and is greatly affected by the surface topography. Moreover, existing deterministic topography characterization methods often fail to accurately reflect the actual sealing contact surface features. Thereby, this paper aims to propose a new leakage rate calculation method based on surface topography reconstruction and percolation theory.
Establishing a deterministic topography model of the sealing contact surface through surface measurement and topography reconstruction, and then a mixed lubrication analysis is carried out to obtain the oil film thickness distribution in combination with FEM simulation, followed by extraction of the percolation channel and finally leakage rate is calculated through the separation height of the channel.
The results show that leakage rate calculation based on the topography reconstruction is close to the experimental data, validating the effectiveness of the proposed model.
This paper offers a new method to calculate the leakage rate of reciprocating seal considering the actual topography of sealing surface.
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-05-2025-0243
