Improving the sealing performance of honeycomb seal by drilling double wall-holes

A novel double-wall-hole honeycomb seal (D-WHHCS) is proposed in this paper. D-WHHCS is designed based on a traditional honeycomb seal (HCS) by drilling double holes in the honeycomb sidewalls. The leakage characteristics of D-WHHCS are investigated via the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The sealing performance of D-WHHCS under different seal clearances, wall hole positions, operating pressures and rotating speeds is studied. The sealing mechanism of D-WHHCS is revealed. The results show that D-WHHCS has better sealing performance than HCS under all the considered operating conditions, with a maximum leakage reduction of 3.95%. A fluid concentration effect when the axial cavity number (N) = 14 is observed in D-WHHCS, which causes a 9.16% improvement in the maximum turbulent kinetic energy compared with HCS at the outlet extension. A large vortex in the cavities of D-WHHCS with N = 14 is guided by the jets at the centerlines of the drilling hoes. The average turbulent dissipation in the cavities of D-WHHCS is a maximum increase of 95.30%, even though the vortexes in the cavities with N = 13 are weakened by the counteractive effect of two jets. The leakage reduction performance of D-WHHCS decreases with increasing clearance. An abnormal low-pressure region is produced in the first cavity because the intensive jet covers the first two cavities and suppresses the throttling effect of the first-stage honeycomb cavity. The leakage of D-WHHCS further decreases along with holes closing to rotor surface. •The leakage of double-wall-hole honeycomb seal (D-WHHCS) decreases 3.95%.•A fluid concentration effect is observed in the sealing gap of D-WHHCS.•A huge turbulent dissipation in unit cavities is observed in the D-WHHCS.•The sealing performance of D-WHHCS is weakened with seal gap increasing.•The smaller the distance between holes and rotor is, the larger the vortexes is.