Simulation and testing on performance of the woven brush seal in vacuum environment

The liquid lubrication is one of the most common lubrication modes in long-term space equipment, the sealing for liquid lubricants is thus important. Woven brush seal is motived by contact, which is able to achieve zero gap and thus have better performance than others. In this paper, we propose a woven brush seal system based on the model of porous medium with deformation of woven brush wire in anisotropic. For estimating the leakage and verifying availability of our system, we build calculation models by employing finite volume k-epsilon model and SIMPSON calculation method. Additionally, we run both simulation and experiments to evaluate our system, the calculation and experimental results show that: the leakage is much lower than traditional labyrinth seal, the amount of leakage increases gradually with the increase of rotational speed. The calculation method and boundary conditions are consistent with the actual situation. Namely, woven brush is able to satisfy the requirements in vacuum environment and thus considered as the corresponding seal component.