A Computational Method for Cavitation in a Wavy Mechanical Seal

A stable and convergent computational method is presented for the calculation of the flow field in the film between the faces of a wavy mechanical seal. The method is particularly useful for situations in which cavitation may occur in the film. The boundary conditions are formulated so as to allow for the occurrence of cavitation nodes on the low pressure boundary. Numerical results are presented for a particular wavy seal to demonstrate the validity of the method over a wide range of the two most important parameters governing the occurrence and the extent of the cavitation zone.