A Study of Cloth Seal Leakage Performance Based on Geometry and Pressure Load

Metal cloth seals have been used increasingly in gas turbines due to their flexibility and superior leakage performance. Leakage performance of a metal cloth seal depends on operating conditions, slot and geometric dimensions. These parameters need to be investigated for the best leakage performance. In this study, pressure drop and critical geometric parameters of typical cloth seal form are investigated with an experimental setup. Slot depth, cloth width, sealing gap, shim thickness, surface roughness, pressure drop, offset and mismatch are selected parameters for the screening experiments. Sixteen experiments were conducted following a two-level Resolution IV fractional factorial experiment design for eight parameters. The results indicated that strong parameters for the leakage performance are pressure drop, cloth width, slot depth and offset. Leakage rate is increased with an increase in slot depth, gap, shim thickness, pressure drop and mismatch. During screening experiments, the experiment with minimum flow rate has 86% lower leakage rate than the experiment with maximum flow rate. For main experiments, a Box-Behnken experiment design is applied to analyze nonlinear effects of four strong parameters on the leakage rate. A closed-form equation is derived based on the data and presented in this study.