Why PTFE Rotary Seals vs Normal Rubber

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Video Transcript

Today we’re going to talk about PTFE rotary seals.

PTFE is more commonly known in the industry as Teflon, but today we’re going to refer to it as PTFE because Teflon is the DuPont trade name. Reasons we would choose to use PTFE over your normal rubber elastomer style seal would be that we’ve exceeded the capabilities. Whether it be speed, pressure, temperature, and maybe the chemicals that it meets. PTFE is a very low friction material – so it’s able to operate at very high speeds.

It’s got a very broad temperature range. Virgin PTFE can handle ranges from -425 Fahrenheit up to 450 Fahrenheit and we can even shift that range a little higher depending on the fillers that we add to it. So, it can handle a wide range of temperatures and basically any fluid or chemical that you throw at it.

High Speed, Low Pressure Profile

For this one, we’ve got very lightly loaded and very flexible lips that are machined. They’re very lightly engaged, so we need a shaft that runs very true – no runout because PTFE is not a very resilient material. It needs some form of energizer in order to make sure that it remains in contact with the shaft.

So with this profile here, we’re going to be limited to about 50 psi, but we can run up to about 5,000 surface feet per minute for speeds. We have an excluder and then the main lip to retain the fluid.

Alterations

High Pressure, Low Speed Profile

If we shift gears and go over to this other style, we’re looking at high pressure but relatively low speed.

The pressure rating on this profile would be about 3,000 PSI and your surface speed is going to be limited to about 1,000 surface feet per minute.

Alterations

We’ve got quite a few different options as far as lip styles:

So, we’ve got a wide range of possibilities with PTFE and we can tailor the fillers depending on the application conditions and the performance criteria needed. There’s a wide range of additives that we can put in the PTFE to tailor to the needs.

Applications

Wide range of applications that these seals can be used in:

• A lot of times you’ll see them in gearboxes or motors
• Pressure washers for when we’ve got high pressure
• Rotary unions
• Swivels
• Compressors
• The Virgin PTFE is FDA compliant. So it’s a good option for those types of applications.
• Cryogenics due to the wide temperature range
• Robotics

Another benefit of PTFE versus a rubber elastomer seal is that there’s no tooling required for these. These get machined out of a sleeve or billet of material. So prototyping and initial samples are very fast and inexpensive.

And that’s it for PTFE seals.