The design and selection of materials for a general purpose mechanical seal

Abstract The predominant requirements for mechanical seals for use on modern continuous process plants are reliability, safety and ease of fitting & maintenance. Many users do not have specific engineering skills to select specially designed seals for particular applications. Nor do they have the fitting skills on process plants to deal with complex mechanical seals which may have many individual components which require expert fitting on the plant itself. The need was therefore identified for a general purpose mechanical seal which was easy to select for a particular application, and was both safe and reliable in operation. This paper describes the design, testing, development and areas for application of the Flexibox FFET general purpose cartridge seal for standard metric and inch shafts and a wide range of process and industrial machines, handling liquids — as varied as water, oil, chemicals and slurries.