Performance characterization of marine lip seals: Contact temperature and frictional torque

This paper investigates the performance of marine thruster lip seals. Marine lip seals have received much less attention in the published literature than lip seals used in other fields. The main differences between marine and non-marine lip seals are the harder material compound, the higher oil pressure, and the larger diameters. The lip seals that are studied in this paper have a nominal diameter of 300 mm. The counterface is a tungsten-carbide-coated stainless steel shaft liner. The studied lip seals and their counterfaces are commonly used in marine applications. A full-scale test device is built to study the effects of marine-specific parameters on the behavior of the lip seal, using a parameter sweep of the oil temperature, oil pressure, and rotational speed. Air bearings are used to allow for a more accurate measurement of the frictional torque. The subsurface temperature at the contact is measured using a wireless temperature probe inside the rotating shaft liner. In future work, the subsurface temperature is used in a thermal finite element model to estimate the average contact temperature.