LAUSR

To improve the performance of the cone bit bearing seal, experimental study and simulation analysis of seal failure were carried out, and optimization of the seal was conducted. Results show that damages are located on the shoulder of the rubber rings due to high shear stress caused by large compression ratio, and serious wear appears on the sealing face of the metal rings because of unreasonable contact pressure distribution. Optimization was conducted by finite element method on three aspects: the dip angles (3°–8°) of the sealing face, the widths (1.3–3.9 mm) of the sealing face, and the back support structure (10°–15°). These three aspects were optimized one by one. Each aspect was optimized by different values, with the average compression ratio and the contact pressure distribution of the sealing face acting as evaluations. The optimal value of the previous optimization step performs as the static value in the next step, and finally, the optimized structure was selected from the last step. The performance of the optimized seal is significantly improved. The compression ratio of the optimized seal rubber drops to less than 14%. The wear mount of the new structure reduces to 20%–38% of the original structure.