B-Tech Project

STATIC ANALYSIS OF A COMPOSITE AUTOMOTIVE DRIVE SHAFT   

 As the natural resources goes on decreasing now a days and to meet the needs of natural resources conservation, energy economy most of the automobile manufacturers and their sub contractors are attempting to reduce the weight of the vehicles in recent years. In this approach they are searching for low cost, high strength to weight ratio materials. Substituting composite structures for conventional metallic structures in automobile industries has many advantages because of higher specific stiffness and strength of composite materials. Composite materials have the major advantage of high strength to weight ratio with continuously decreasing travel of cost in addition to other advantages like excellent corrosive resistance, superior torsional buckling and fatigue strength and high specific strain energy storage capacity.

The present work aims at the suitability of composite materials usage for the drive shafts in almost all automobiles at least those which correspond to design with rear wheel drive and front engine installation. The weight reduction of the drive shaft can have a certain role in the general weight reduction of the vehicle and is a highly desirable goal, if it can be achieved without increase in cost and decrease in quality and reliability. It is possible to reduce the weight of the drive shaft considerably by optimizing the design parameters by satisfying the all constraints.

This work deals with the design, material selection, optimum stacking sequence, and performance of composite drive shaft for passenger cars, small trucks and vans. Optimum design was made based on torsional stiffness formula and strength to weight ratio characteristics of solid to hollow shafts. Many reinforcements and matrix resin materials have been considered for material selection before the combination of e-glass/ carbon/ boron/ graphite  and epoxy resins was selected. More number of iterations was made for optimum stacking sequence based on number of layers, fiber orientation and sizing of radius for different combinations of reinforced and matrix resin materials. This study also aims to compare the performance of the composite drive shaft over steel drive shaft and suggested the suitability of composite materials in the automobile industries.

In this approach optimum designed drive shaft finite element model is prepared in finite element commercial software ANSYS 11.0. The static analysis was made on different materials and its combinations with matrix as epoxy resin for optimum number of layers, fiber orientation and optimum stacking sequence which are very much required for rotating elements like drive shafts.

  Static analysis is required for drive shaft is to evaluate based on torque transmission capacity along with angle of twist which should be with in limits of allowable shear stress. 

Key Words: Composite drive shaft, Stacking sequence, Weight reduction, Optimization, Epoxy resin