DESIGN & ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE MATERIAL SHAFT IN AUTOMOBILE: A REVIEW

Substituting composite structures for conventional metallic structures have many advantages because of higher specific stiffness and strength of composite materials. In the recent days, there is a huge demand for a light weight material such as fiber reinforced polymer composites seems to be a promising solution to this arising demand. This work deals with the replacement of conventional steel drive shafts with a Kevlar/epoxy or E glass polythene resin composite drive shaft for an automotive application. The intention of work is to minimize the weight of drive shaft. The automotive industry is exploiting composite material technology for structural components construction in order to obtain the reduction of the weight without decrease in vehicle quality and reliability. It is known that energy conservation is one of the most important objectives in vehicle design and reduction of weight is one of the most effective measures to obtain this result. Actually, there is almost a direct proportionality between the weight of a vehicle and its fuel consumption, particularly in city driving. This project is analysis done on drive shaft with different composite materials and concludes that the use of composite materials for drive shaft would induce less amount of stress which additionally reduces the weight of the vehicle. CREO is the modelling package used to model the drive shaft arrangement and ANSYS is the analysis package used to carry out analysis.