General presentation > Keynote speaker

Pr. Michael M. Khonsari

Dow chemical Chair, Professor of mechanical engineering

Lousiana State University, Baton-Rouge, USA

Professor Khonsari earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. all in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Khonsari holds the Dow Chemical Endowed Chair in Rotating Machinery and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State University. Prior to joining LSU, he spent a number of years as a faculty member at The Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, and served as the Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Energy Processes at Southern Illinois University. He has also served as a research Faculty Fellow at NASA Lewis Research Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force laboratories, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Professor Khonsari is the holder of several US patents, has authored 4 technical books in tribology, fatigue, and rotor dynamics and over 300 archival papers including book chapters and special publications.  He is the recipient of several research awards including the ASME Mayo Hersey Award, Burt Newkirk Award, the STLE Presidential Award, ALCOA awards for his contributions to tribology. He is the Editor-In-Chief for ASME Journal of Tribology and serves on the Editorial Board of STLE Tribology Transactions, Institution of Mechanical Engineers Journal of Engineering Tribology, Tribology International, Advances in Tribology, Acta Tribologica, and Patents on Mechanical Engineering, Lubricants, and Entropy. Professor Khonsari is a fellow of ASME, STLE, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Heat Transfer Augmentation Techniques to Improve Seal Life

Industry spends huge sums of money on pump repair every year. It is estimated that 80% of the repair costs is due to seals and bearings. The most influential factors identified to be responsible for seal failure are: high interfacial temperature and associated thermal distortion between the rotating and mating seal rings, thermoelastic instability, and excessive non-uniform wear. The process is governed by viscous heating of the fluid as it is sheared between ring faces and cooling provided by the flush fluid. Water can easily reach its boiling point and cause damage by flashing across the faces. When low-viscosity hydrocarbon liquids such as liquid butane are used, the heat generation is also affected by the rubbing friction between.  Further, if the operating speed exceeds a certain critical value, then thermoelastic instability leading to formation of macroscopic hot spots on the seal faces can occur depending on the contact pressure, surface finish and material properties. Thus, the reduction of interface temperature to prolong the seals life calls for implementation of appropriate heat transfer augmentation techniques. In this lecture, I present several recent heat transfer augmentation technologies developed at LSU Center for Rotating Machinery designed to reduce interfacial heat in mechanical seals. They include the design of seal rings with an internal heat exchanger, surface texturing techniques to improve heat transfer, and the design of a new generation of seals with a heat pipe.