Study on the Seal Leakage of Turbocharger

Abstract

Piston ring sealing is commonly applied to turbocharger, so there must be some gas leakage due to the non-contact sealing when operating. However, excess leakage will affect the normal operation of turbocharger and engine. In this paper, the computation and the calibration methods of gas flow for the piston ring sealing are described. The numerical simulation which uses the well-orthogonalized hexahedral grid is carried out in the CFD software STAR-CD. It shows that the numerical simulation results fit well with the test results. The computation and test results also show that the side clearance is the determining parameter that affects the leakage rate of double piston ring sealing. Through the study of the position of piston ring in the ring slot on the leakage rate and the measurement of axial displacement of the rotor when operating, the correlation of the computation results and the test results is analyzed. In the seal leakage test, different conditioning ways of turbocharger operating points will greatly affect the measurement of leakage rate.