Date of Award

5-5-2025

Degree Type

Capstone Project

First Advisor

Bahram Nassersharif

Abstract

MagsSeal is a leader in the magnetic seal industry and provides uniquely designed seals to much of the aerospace and automotive communities. With highly regulated customers like these, MagSeal’s magnetic rotor seals are held to the highest standard of quality. Currently, MagSeal utilizes a hand operated arbor press to seat the carbon seal ring into the magnetic rotor casing. This poses two issues: there is little consistency in the pressing force applied to their seals and some operators are not able to press seals due to the labor-intensive nature of this task. The MagSeal carbon seal press project aims to improve the accuracy of the MagSeal manufacturing process by providing a controlled press to seat the carbon seals used in MagSeal’s seals into the magnetic rotor casings reliability while recording data on the pressing force that can be sent to MagSeal’s customers. The press is required to fit on a workbench located in MagSeal’s manufacturing facility, be able to seat seal’s ranging from an inch in diameter up to seven inches in diameter and require minimal maintenance.

From our initial research and after several design iterations, the team arrived at a design centered around a dual lead screw press driven by a singular motor. This press utilizes a load cell to read the pressing force, which is wired to a display to allow the operator to read and record the force in real time. The press is run using a ClearCore controller, which takes the input from the two-handed user-operated controller and moves within the top and bottom proximity sensors, with an emergency stop button incorporated into the setup as well. The structural components of the press use steel, aluminum, and bronze to maintain structural integrity and overall rigidity, as well as high strength fasteners to hold it together. There are also additional polycarbonate sheets and bellows to help reduce the frequency of maintenance. All these components were designed using rigorous design criteria to ensure that components would fit together properly. Components were machined in MagSeal’s machine shop before being assembled and tested in the URI machine shop. Overall, this design met or exceeded all sponsor design specifications and engineering requirements.

Key accomplishments are highlighted by the successful pressing of three (3) different size seals, with press forces being recorded. This was perhaps the biggest accomplishment of the project, with the feat being performed during the URI COE Capstone Showcase in front of our sponsor and professors, validating our overall design choices.

Comments

Team Name: Team 10

Company Sponsor: MagSeal

Sponsor Representative: Richard Douleh, Jared Desrosiers, Derek Jervis

Document Reference: URI-MCE-402-010-2025

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