CFD Modeling of a High-Pressure Honeycomb Seal for Centrifugal Compressors

This paper focuses on the development of an optimized CFD model of a honeycomb seal for a centrifugal compressor and on the estimation of the dynamic coefficients from the developed CFD model. The numerical results are then validated with experimental data from an industrial authors’ company test-rig, in terms of leakage flow-rate and dynamic coefficients. The most relevant difference respect to previous papers resides in the radial dimension of the seal, in the working pressure range, in the working fluid and finally in the direct comparison between the calculated and the experimental rotordynamic coefficients. A good fitting between the numerical and experimental coefficient was observed, but further improvement on the CFD model could be proposed to increase the accuracy of results.