A Numerical Analysis Method of Hydraulic Seals for Downhole Equipments

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a numerical method to predict the work performance of hydraulic seals used in downhole equipments. The impact of key factors, namely, compression rate and the number of seals, on the wearing behavior of seal components is studied. To simulate the wear process of sealing contact surface, a methodology is built with the iterative wear prediction procedure in which the geometry of the contact interfaceprogressively changes according to the wear model. In this method, the structural and the thermal coupled mechanism is investigated and the performance of seal structure containing different number of seals is discussed. By taking a gear pump used in the downhole robots as a case study, both numerical analysis with proposed method and practical experiment are presented. The simulation results of the worn volume of the seals are consistent with the experiment data. This work provides an effective computerized approach to aid seal components design and manufacturing for downhole equipments.