Brush Seals Used in Steam Environments—Chronological Wear Development and the Impact of Different Seal Designs

During the last decades, turbo machine efficiency was considerably increased by using more efficient seals. Brush seals, as a compliant contacting filament seal, have become an attractive alternative to conventional labyrinth seals in the field of aircraft engines as well as in stationary gas and steam turbines. The aim of today's research related to brush seals is to understand the characteristics and their connections, in order to be able to make performance predictions, and to ensure the reliability over a defined operating period. The wear behavior is essentially influenced by frictional contacts at the seal-to-rotor interface during operation. For realistic investigations with representative circumferential velocities, the TU Braunschweig, Germany, operates a specially developed steam test rig which enables endurance investigations under varying operating steam conditions up to 50 bar and 450 °C. Wear measurements and the determination of seal performance characteristics, such as blow down and bristle stiffness, are enabled by an additional test facility, using pressurized cold air up to 8 bar as a working fluid. This work presents the chronological wear development on both rotor and seal sides in a steam test lasting 25 days or 11 days, respectively. Interruptions after stationary and transient intervals were made in order to investigate the degree of wear. Two different seal arrangements, a single tandem seal, and a two-stage single seal arrangement, using different seal elements were considered. Besides a continuous wear development, the results clearly show that the abrasive wear of the brush seal and rotor is mainly caused by transient test operations, particularly by enforced contacts during shaft excursions. Despite the increasing wear to the brushes, all seals have shown a functioning radial-adaptive behavior over the whole test duration with a sustained seal performance. Thereby, it could be shown that the two-stage arrangement displays a load shift during transients, leading to a balanced loading and unloading status for the two single brush seals. From load sharing, and in comparison with the wear data of the tandem seal arrangement, it can be derived that the two-stage seal is less prone to wear. However, the tandem seal arrangement, bearing the higher pressure difference within one configuration, shows a superior sealing performance under constant load, i.e., under stationary conditions.