Compliant Plate Seals: Testing and Validation

Abstract

Compliant Plate Seals are being developed for various turbomachinery sealing applications including gas turbines, steam turbines, aircraft engines and oil & gas compressors. These seals consist of compliant plates attached to a stator in a circumferential fashion around the rotor. The compliant plates have a slot that extends radially inwards from the seal outer diameter, and an intermediate plate extends inwards into this slot from stator. This design is capable of providing passive hydrostatic feedback forces acting on the compliant plates that balance at a small tip–clearance. Due to this self–correcting behavior, this seal is capable of providing high differential pressure capability and low leakage within a limited axial span, and non-contact operation even in the presence of large rotor transients. In this paper, we have reported leakage test results for Compliant Plate Seals and visually demonstrated robust non-contact operation for different assembly clearances and interferences, stator deflections, high frequency rotor transients, different pressure conditions and rotational speeds.