A Leakage Rate Calculation Method for O-ring Seal Based on Compound Leakage Channel Model

O-ring seal is one of the most common sealing forms in mechanical structures. Accurate calculation of leakage rate of O-ring seal helps to ensure its sealing performance, which is important for the safety, reliability and environmental protection of mechanical products and equipment. Existing O-ring leakage rate calculation methods are difficult to achieve a good balance between calculation accuracy and model complexity. To solve this problem, a method for leakage rate calculation of O-ring seal based on the compound leakage channel model is proposed. Compound leakage channel model defines the leakage channel as two typical forms, including triangular channel and trapezoidal channel, by uniformly arranging the triangular peaks of rough surface profile. Compared with the existing methods which model the leakage channel with a single geometry, the compound leakage channel model introduces statistical parameters of rough surface triangular peaks to characterize the leakage channel, which fully reflects the influence of the surface topography characteristics on the channel form and the leakage rate. The leakage simulation experiment of the local sealing unit shows that the compound leakage channel model has the better calculation accuracy than the traditional Roth model. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a typical O-ring seal structure, and the leakage rate measurement experiment is designed and implemented. The experiment results show that the average relative error of the leakage rate under different O-ring compression rate does not exceed 15%. The effectiveness of the proposed method in real application cases is verified. © 2023 Editorial Office of Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering. All rights reserved.