Mechanical face seals. Hydrostatic lubrication

Mechanical seals could pass for relatively trivial mechanical components if we were to consider only the arrangement and number of parts that make them up. This is not the case, and this article reminds us that there is a wide variety of operating conditions and technological arrangements for seals, the technical aspects of which are developed in articles [BM 5 425] and [BM 5 426] .

Their behavior is the result of a variety of interacting phenomena: lubrication of friction surfaces, kinematics, dynamics, thermomechanical deformation of component parts, heat dissipation and transfer, etc.

In some cases, approximations allow us to consider that the faces of a trim are aligned. The corresponding theoretical model, developed in this article, is relatively simple. It leads to analytical or semi-analytical solutions that can easily be used by design engineers. These solutions make it possible to highlight certain key phenomena in the behavior of seals, and to assess their performance with sufficient accuracy in many cases.