Failure Analysis of Beater Shaft of Double Roller Ginning Machine using FEM

Ginning is the process of separation of cotton fibers from its seed. In the cotton ginning machine there is a fixed knife and moving knife. This moving knife is called as beater and it oscillates about its central longitudinal axis of the beater shaft. The fixed knife is in contact with the roller made of leather linings. The distance between the roller and the fixed knife is adjusted according to the quality of the raw cotton. Using this fixed knife and rollers cotton fibers are captured and the beater beats the held cotton to remove seed from it. During the operation the shaft fails at particular point due to wet cotton and after some duration (fatigue failure). In order to remove these failures two approaches will be used i.e. changing the dimensions of the shaft or changing the material of the shaft which will remove the failure at greater extent. So first we will design and analysis the beater shaft using Pro E and ANSYS 12.0 software respectively and finding the failure at particular point and also redesign the shaft and analysis of the same.