Design and Analysis of Air Compressor Intake Valve Body Casing by Metallic Material and Hybrid Polyamide Composite

An industrial air compressor is finding a wide range of usage in manufacturing and assembly areas. The intake valve body is one of the major parts in the industrial air compressor which serves numerous functions like regulating the amount of air into the compressor for pressurizing and prevents the backflow of oil. The main intern of our proposed work is to design and conduct Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in air intake valve body casing part with commercially used metallic material of LM6 aluminium alloy and proposed hybrid polymer composite. The proposed polymer material Polyphthalamide (PPA) reinforced with 30wt% glass fiber and 5% Poly tetra fluro ethylene (PTFE) hybrid composites were prepared through the injection moulding route and the obtained tested responses were taken as input data for the further analysis. For this analysis, the bottom housing of the air intake valve body was designed using Solidworks and the developed model was taken for coupled field analysis by using Ansys workbench 18.1. The FEA analysis was carried out in four different operating conditions of an air compressor by changing the pressure and temperature variants for both the materials. The output responses such as total deformation and von-mises stress are taken in each operating condition. The analyzed results show that the hybrid polymer composite will meet the results of the available LM6 aluminium alloy material in each operating condition due to the higher factor of safety because of its better bonding and superior strength. Along with this, the polymer hybrid composites show nearly 55% of the mass reduced when compared with the LM6 aluminium alloy because of its low density. Therefore, the proposed hybrid polymer composite will be recommended for the replacement of the structural casing part in air compressor and automobile component replacements.