Calculating 'Required Clamping force' to seal case 1

[piewarmer]

Hi

I'm designing a plastic enclosure (lid and a base) not dissimiar to a peli case in design. There will be an Oring and Oring groove feature within the Lid.

I would like to know how much pressure / clamping force is required to compress my seal sufficiently so mating face of lid and mating face of base are in contact?

I'm not sure if anyone knows of a formula?

Thanks in advance

Ben

 

[btrueblood]

Compress the O-ring by about 15% to 20%. The force generated by the O-ring compression can be calculated (there is some data for this in the handbook link below), but it's easier to just make up a rig and test it using the O-ring compound of your choice. Make sure the groove has more cross section area than the original O-ring, add a bit extra to allow for thermal expansion. See the Parker O-ring Handbook for more info. (can take awhile to load, it's ~9MB):

http://www.parker.com/literature/ORD 5700 Parker_O-Ring_Handbook.pdf