An Experimental Investigation of Glass Fiber Reinforced Hybrid Composite Automotive Drive Shaft

Nowadays, a composite material is used as replacement of the conventional materials in Automobile industries because of high strength to light weight properties, which reduces the overall vehicle weight without compromising the strength and reliability. Composite materials with higher specific stiffness, low weight, high damping capacity have greater torque capacity than conventional drive shaft. The advanced composite materials such as carbon and glass with epoxy resin are widely used because of their high specific strength and high specific modulus. The aim of this work is to replace the conventional steel driveshaft of automobiles with an appropriate composite driveshaft. Study also includes the preparation of composite shaft in single piece for overall weight reduction, whereas the conventional drive shafts are made in two pieces for reducing the bending natural frequency. In this approach, optimum designed drive shaft finite element model will be prepared in finite element commercial software ANSYS. The static, free vibration and Tensional buckling analysis will be done which are very much essential for rotating elements like drive shafts. Experiment also conducted on instrument to measure the mechanical properties of composite shaft.