Design and analysis of automotive composite propeller shaft using fea

Abstract

The last few years have seen the increasing use of composite materials in many fields of engineering applications. Polymer composites are today widely used to design the automobile components in view of their outstanding specific stiffness and strength properties. Composite shafts for automotive applications are among the most current areas of investigation. Weight reduction can be primarily achieved by the introduction of better material. The conventional system uses metallic shaft, has inherent limitations like heavy weight, corrosion, flexibility problems, vibrations, bearing and manufacturing problems, which magnifies with increase in shaft diameter. Advanced composite materials offer the potential to improve propulsion shafting, by reducing weight, bearing loads, alignment problems, life- cycle cost by using strategic materials, by increasing allowable fatigue stress, flexibility, and vibration damping characteristics.This paper is related to investigations on Carbon Reinforced plastics (CFRP) and Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastics (GFRP) composite hollow shafts for automobiles. Failure analysis has been carried out using maximum stress criteria and it is found that the failure torque is well above the design torque level.For accurate design solution, the propeller shaft was analyzed using FEM techniques (ANSYS package). The propeller shaft was geometrically modeled using FEM “3D-shell99 element and solid46 layered element”. To check all failure modes, linear static analysis, vibration Eigen value analysis, buckling analysis and harmonic analysis were done.