Experimental Validation and Numerical Simulation of Static Pressure in Multi-Stage Ferrofluid Seals

Abstract

With the development of science technology, ferrofluid seal has been intensively applied in mechanical industry, but more and more larger sealing stages are needed. At present, the literature mostly concentrated on numerical analysis with few pole pieces ferrofluid seals and focused on the critical pressure value in one-stage magnetic fluid seal, lacking of numerical simulation and experimental validation on the static pressure of multi-stage ferrofluid seals. On this basis, the analysis of larger number of sealing stages is presented. And numerical simulation along with experiment investigation was used to study the seal capacity of ferrofluids in different seal gaps and different seal stages in this paper. The results show that the theoretical value is well coincident with experimental value when the sealing gap is less than 0.2 mm. Increase the number of the pole tooth can significantly improve the seal capacity of ferrofluid seal, but the sealing pressure of ferrofluids does not increase linearly with the addition of the number of pole teeth. For the new structure, the pressure of one-stage pole tooth has more than doubled as the sealing clearance is 0.2 mm and 3.5 times increase when the sealing gap is 0.3 mm.