Reed valves in a compressor are critical parts that have a high fatigue failure potential due to cyclic bending and impact caused by the cyclic nature of the compression process. A sudden failure of a valve renders the compressor useless. Although the refining process of methods of fatigue design has already taken more than 50 years, older criteria such as Gerber and Goodman models are still attractive for engineering design of high cycle fatigue components. This paper presents an investigation on the effect of nonzero mean stress on the design of valve reeds that are widely used in compressors. The investigation relates the choice of a mean stress compensation models, with the predicted fluctuating bending fatigue strength and estimated safety coefficient values. The calculations have been performed using Gerber, Goodman, Soderberg, ASME, Crossland, and Tsapi-Soh models. The most relevant goal of this paper is to verify the efficiency of classical and advanced stress based multiaxial fatigue criteria to estimated value of fluctuating bending fatigue strength. The criterion proposed by Tsapi-Soh was found to gives estimated value of the fluctuating bending fatigue strength very close to the typical value from technical data and satisfying results in predicting the survival of the reed valves under bending fatigue failure.

Newer fatigue prediction models for estimating the multiaxial fatigue limit often lack a simple analytical solution and the complexity of multiaxial solutions during programming makes testing an unattractive task. This paper summarizes an attempt to propose a novel equivalent stress approach suitable for estimating fatigue damage in the presence of complex multiaxial fatigue loadings. According to the devised method, fatigue limit under multiaxial loading is evaluated by proposing an equivalent loading with zero out-of-phase angles. The accuracy of the proposed approach was systematically checked by means of 87 experimental data taken from the literature and generated by testing different metallic materials under both in-phase and out-of-phase biaxial fatigue loading. Results show that the equivalent stress approach is an elaboration of non-conservative stress invariant based multiaxial fatigue criteria like the well-known Sines method. This exercise allowed us to prove that the systematic application of the equivalent stress resulted in highly accurate predictions and it held true independently of the cause of the mobility of principal stress directions of the stress field damaging the fatigue process zone. Simulations also emphasize a general quite better precision of the proposed equivalent stress approach when compared to another method, namely the minimum circumscribed ellipse approach.