A New Approach to Evaluate Sealing Characteristics of Reciprocating Seals

One of the demands regarding reciprocating seals is to minimize the leakage from machineries due to global environmental issue. Especially in these years, rising in efficiency and downsizing of the machineries make the operating conditions of the seals severer than ever. Therefore, it becomes more important to know the sealing performance with high accuracy under actual operating conditions. In order to meet the request, a new method based on visualization and spectroscopy is presented. In this paper the description of the technique and the first results obtained with general reciprocating seals are shown.