ABSTRACT
The rotating articulated skirt and the underwater vehicle are sealed by an O-ring which is compressed by bolts pre-tightening flange, to solve the difficulty of sealing the rotating articulated skirt and the underwater vehicle in a deep water operation. In this paper, the O-ring was taken as the object of study. 3 order Yeoh model is used as the corresponding material parameters of the hyper-elastic constitutive relation curve fitting of the O-ring, using the finite element software to analyse the influence of different number of bolts pre-tightening on the contact stress and shear stress of the O-ring. Thus the dangerous section position is obtained, and the optimal number of bolts is acquired through the analysis of contact stress on the dangerous sections. The results show that: on the contact surfaces A and B, the contact stress of O-rings which are pre-tightened by 24 bolts is 14.635 MPa and 13.011 MPa, while the seal areas that meet the requirements are 52.52% and 67.14%, which is far stronger than a setting 22, 20 or 26 bolts.
