Methodology of Designing Sealing Systems for Highly Loaded Rotary Machines

Higher parameters of centrifugal machines are constantly required, such as the pressure of the medium to be sealed and the speed of rotation of the shaft. However, as the parameters increase, it becomes more and more difficult to ensure the effectiveness of sealing. In addition, sealing systems affect the overall safety of equipment operation, especially vibration. In order to harmonize the sealing functions and increase the dynamic rigidity of the rotors of centrifugal machines, a method for modeling complex sealing systems has been developed. Non-contact seals are considered as hydrostatic–dynamic bearings that can effectively dampen rotor oscillations. A general approach to the analysis of non-contact seals as automatic control systems and an algorithm for constructing their dynamic characteristics at the design stage were proposed for the first time. Models of “rotor-gap seal”, impulse seal and “rotor–hydraulic face” systems, and seal-supports of a shaftless pump have been studied to assess the effect of these seal systems on the oscillatory characteristics of the rotor. Analytical dependencies are obtained for calculating the dynamic characteristics and stability limits of seals as hydromechanical systems. The directions for improving the safety of operation of critical pumping equipment due to a targeted increase in the rigidity of non-contact seals are determined, which leads to an increase in the vibration resistance of the rotor and the environ-mental safety of centrifugal machines. The paper proposes a method for designing sealing systems based on the configuration of sealing components in order to achieve harmonization between sealing and vibration reliability, taking into account oscillatory processes due to hydrodynamic sealing characteristics.