Design And Analysis of Composite Drive Shaft Made of Different Materials for Application in Automobiles

Substituting composite structures for conventional metallic structures has many advantages because of higher specific stiffness and strength of composite materials. Advanced composite materials seem ideally suited for long, power driver shaft applications. Their elastic properties can be tailored to increase the torque and the rotational speed at which they operate. The drive shafts are used in automotive, aircraft and aerospace applications for power transmission. This work deals with the replacement of conventional two-piece steel drive shafts with a single-piece E-Glass/ Epoxy, High Strength Carbon/Epoxy composite drive shaft for an automotive application. The design parameters were optimized for E-Glass/ Epoxy, High Strength Carbon/Epoxy composite drive shafts of an automobile using FEA. The design parameters such as thickness optimized with the objective of minimizing the weight of composite drive shafts which is subjected to the constraints such as torque transmission, torsional buckling capacities and fundamental lateral natural frequency. The weight savings of the E-Glass/ Epoxy, High Strength Carbon/Epoxy shaft were 48.36 %, 86.90 % of the steel shaft respectively. The torque transmission capacity of the composite drive shafts have been calculated by neglecting and considering the effect of centrifugal forces and it was observed that centrifugal forces will reduce the torque transmission capacity of the shaft. The variation of the stress along the thickness of the Steel, E-Glass/Epoxy, and High Strength Carbon/Epoxy composite drive shafts are observed. It is also observed that all stresses are within in the allowable limit. Static, Modal and Buckling analysis are carried out on the finite element Analysis of the composite drive shaft.