The Queensland Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence is investigating the use of supercritical CO2 closed loop Brayton cycles in the Concentrated Solar Thermal power cycle plant. One of the important components in the turbomachinery within the plant are seals. As the cycle is closed loop and operating at high pressures, dry gas seals have been recommended for future use in these systems. One of the main challenges of using supercritical CO2 dry gas seals is that operating conditions are near the critical point. In the supercritical region in the vicinity of the critical point (304 K, 7.4 MPa), CO2 behaves as a real-gas, exhibiting large and abrupt non-linear changes in fluid and transport properties and high densities. To correctly predict the seal operation and performance, the interaction between this real gas and the seal rotor (primary ring) and the seal stator (mating ring) need to analysed and investigated in detail, as they can lead to significant changes in flow and seal performance. Results from this paper show that increased centrifugal effects caused by higher gas densities can reduce the pressure in the sealing dam region. This adversely affects the loading capacity of the dry gas seal. However, it also benefits seal performances by reducing the leakage rate. The current work presents an investigation of the supercritical CO2 dry gas seals operating close to the critical point with an inlet pressure and temperature of 8.5Mpa and 370K respectively and a speed of 30000 RPM. Results highlighting the effects of the groove length or dam to groove ratio on the performance of the dry gas seal are presented. The seal is simulated using Computational Fluid Dynamics to study the flow behaviour of the supercitical CO2 in the dry gas seal. Supercritical CO2 fluid properties are based on the fluid database REFPROP. The numerical model was validated with previous work and good agreement was demonstrated.

The supercritical CO 2 closed loop Brayton cycle operates at high pressure to achieve higher energy conversion efficiency. One of the important components in turbomachinery of the power cycle plant is the dry gas seals. Dry gas seals are gas-lubricated, mechanical, non-contacting, end-face seals, consisting of a mating (rotating) ring and a primary (stationary) ring. Low leakage dry gas seals are considered as a key enabling technology for achieving the improved thermodynamic cycle efficiency in the supercritical CO 2 power cycle. Alternate seal types, for example, labyrinth seals, suffers from high leakage. Even so there is a growing interest and importance of applying the small length scale dry gas seal in the small to medium scale supercritical closed loop Brayton cycle (1-20 MWe), there are still uncertainties for their operation at supercritical CO 2 conditions. These include the real gas effects near the critical points and the methods of minimizing the deformation of the supercritical CO 2 dry gas seal. In the supercritical region in the vicinity of the critical point (304 K, 7.4 MPa), CO 2 behaves as a real-gas, exhibiting significant and abrupt nonlinear changes in fluid and transport properties and high densities.Comprehensive analysis is performed to simulate the supercritical CO 2 dry gas seal. First, an isothermal simulation assuming rigid sealing ring walls in the gas film is performed using ANSYS Fluent to study the influences of real gas effect on performances of the dry gas seal. Then, conjugate heat transfer simulation is used to optimize the face geometry for a small to median scale supercritical closed loop Brayton cycle (1-20 MWe) using ANSYS Fluent. Finally, the pressure and the thermal outputs from the conjugate heat transfer analysis are used as boundary conditions for one way coupling fluid-structurethermal simulations using ANSYS Static Structural to study the effect of deformation of the sealing rings under applied pressure-loads, thermal-loads, and centrifugal effect.Finding from the simulation results shows, close to critical point the real gas effect is significant, whereas far from the critical point the supercritical fluid resembles an ideal gas. The centrifugal effect is enhanced by the higher density due to the real gas effects, causing a reduction of average pressure in the dam region hence reduces the opening force, and seal leakage.Increasing the groove radius decreases the opening force whereas increasing the spiral angle, increases the opening force. However, the variation is small for all tested cases studies with variation up to 6%. Increasing the groove radius decreases the leakage rate whereas increasing the spiral angle, increases the leakage rate. The variation in changing groove radius is more significant than the spiral angles. The variation in leakage iii is up to 29.2% for all tested cases. In term of the film stiffness, there is no clear pattern when changing the groove radius but the impact of the spiral angle is significant, up to 46.6% for all tested c...