Influence of Oil Temperature on the Lip Seal’s Performance

Abstract

In some application fields—for example, the automotive industry—lip seals operate over a wide temperature range. Under such conditions, oil temperature plays an important role in determining the efficacy of lip seals. In order to simulate the lip seal’s behavior with ambient temperature change, this article improved the traditional simulation approach by characterizing the rubber material property regarding temperature dependency in the model. The effect of oil temperature on the sealing performance of lip seals was investigated through numerical simulation and experiments. The static contact pressure, radial force, reverse pumping rate, and friction torque were calculated as a function of oil temperature. The simulation results were verified by bench testing.

Keywords:

• Lip seals
• temperature
• numerical simulation
• pumping rate
• friction torque

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51505249, 51575300, 51735006) and Independent Research Project of the State Key Laboratory of Tribology (Grant No. SKLT2016B09).