To improve lubrication effect and seal performance, complicated geometrical hydrodynamic grooves or patterns are often processed on end faces of liquid lubricated mechanical seals. These structures can lead to difficulties in precisely estimating the seal performance. In this study, an efficient adaptive finite element method （FEM） algorithm with mass conservation was presented, in which a streamline upwind/Petrov-Galerkin （SUPG） weighted residual FEM and a fast iteration algorithm were applied to solve the lubrication equations （Reynolds equation）. A mesh adaptation technique was utilized to refine the computation domain based on a residual posterior error estimator. Validation, applicability, and efficiency were verified by comparison among different algorithms and by case studies on seals＇ faces with different groove structures. The study investigated the influence of the order of shape function and the mesh number on the leakage balance. Mesh refinement occurred mainly in cavitation zones when cavitation happened, otherwise it occurred in regions with a high pressure gradient. Numerical experiments verified that the proposed algorithm is a fast, effective, and accurate method to simulate lubrication problems in the engineering field apart from end face seals.
