Effects of swirl brake axial arrangement on the leakage performance and rotor stability of labyrinth seals

Swirl brakes are usually introduced at the seal entrance in industry to improve the seal stability, especially for labyrinth seals suffering low seal clearance and high inlet preswirl ratio. However, how to arrange swirl brakes at the seal entrance to obtain better seal stability retains unknown, such as the axial distance between the brake trailing edge and the first tooth. To this end, the effects of the distance between brakes and the first tooth on the leakage flow rate and seal rotordynamic coefficients were numerically investigated at typical inlet preswirl ratios of 0.45 and 0.8, and the predicted results were in comparison with the results for no-brake configuration. The obtained results disclose that the brake configuration arranged against the first tooth produces lower circumferential velocity in the downstream of the brakes as a result of the larger counter-clockwise vortex moving from the brake trailing edge to the brake leading edge when compared to the brake configuration away from the first tooth. Besides, the dropped circumferential velocity in the downstream of brakes will cause larger pressure fluctuation in the circumferential direction and thus generates larger tangential force to restrain the rotor forward whirl. On the other hand, the effective damping is further increased when the distance between brakes and the first tooth decreases to zero, that is, the crossover frequency is even disappeared at the inlet preswirl ratio of 0.45 and successfully drops from 69.9 Hz to 32.7 Hz at the preswirl ratio of 0.8.