A Status of Sealing Performance of End-Face Type Seals for Water Pumps of Automotive Engines in Japan

End-face type seals have been applied as sealing devices for the water pumps in the cooling systems of automotive engines. However, many troublesome problems have occurred for many years and the countermeasures have been investigated as many times. For examples, the problem of excessive abrasion of seal faces caused by foreign particles in liquid to be sealed was solved by using the sliding materials which had a hither thermal conductivity and a lower coefficient of thermal expansion. Furthermore, the noise problem of the ringing phenomena caused by the stick-slip between sliding surfaces was prevented by changing the carbon material whose lubrication characteristics had a negative slope as weak as possible in the Torque-Speed curve.

As a result of these investigations, end face seals of this type have obtained the satisfactory sealing performance for many users' requirements in the present Japanese market.