A Two-Scale Approach for Lubricated Soft-Contact Modeling: An Application to Lip-Seal Geometry

Figure 3

A schematic of a typical lip seal construction. A garter spring enables the radial compression of the seal lip on the shaft surface, ideally preventing fluid leakage from the high pressure side (the fluid reservoir) to the low pressure side. In the running-in stage, the seal lip is macroscopically reshaped as a consequence of the initial lip wear process, which depends on the seal-shaft designed interference and on the solids chemical and physical affinity with the actual lubricant composition. After this bulk material removal (and depending on the viscoelastic rubber properties), a successful seal reaches a steady-state configuration with a well defined roughness pattern, strongly dependent on the actual shaft micro-geometry, and with an established thin lubricant film at the interface.