The Sealing Effect Improvement Prediction of Flat Rubber Ring in Roller Bit Based on Yeoh_Revised Model

In a roller bit, the flat rubber ring (FRR) often needs to apply a certain amount of compression to ensure that its rotation and static sealing surfaces can be stably sealed. For the predicted Mises stress, values smaller than the actual Mises stress due to soft single-axis compression (SAC) stress are predicted by the Yeoh (N = 3) model. To more reasonably predict stress under the static compression of the FRR in the roller bit, the sealing effect of the FRR based on the SAC contact stress and the calculated Mises stress was evaluated by the Yeoh_revised model. Based on the assumption that hydrogenated nitrile-butadiene rubber (HNBR) is isotropic and incompressible, first, we derived the fitting formulas for three types of constitutive models and the Jacobi matrix of the Yeoh_revised model and developed hyperelastic constitutive subroutines. Simultaneously, the accuracy of three models (Yeoh, Yeoh_revised and Ogden) was evaluated by the goodness of fit (R²) to data from three kinds of tensile experiment tests. The highest R² is 0.9771 with the Yeoh_revised model, which merges the advantages of the other two fitting models and effectively improves the Yeoh model's soft property of SAC contact stress. Additionally, by measuring on-site FRR wear, the maximum Mises stress on the sealing surface calculated based on the Yeoh_revised model is about twice that of the Yeoh model, and the maximum Mises stress on the rotation contact sealing surface is higher than that on the outside (static sealing) surface, which makes the aging of the rotation surface more severe. Thus, it was demonstrated that, on the premise of ensuring FRR sealing contact stress, the Yeoh_revised model can more reasonably predict the sealing effect of the FRR to more precisely calculate Mises stress than the Yeoh model. This also contributes to FRR structure optimization to prolong the service life of the FRR in the roller bit.