Design and Experimental Investigation of Composite Automotive Drive Shaft

Abstract

Abstract: Replacing composite bodies by the conventional metallic bodies have many advantages because of high specific strength and high specific stiffness of the composite materials. As compared to the conventional drive shafts, Composite drive shafts have the potential of lighter and longer life with high rotational speed. Nowadays drive shafts are used in two pieces. However, the main advantage of the current design is that only one piece of composite drive shaft is possible that fulfils all the drive shaft requirements. The torsional strength, torsional buckling and bending natural frequency are the main basic requirements considered here. This work is all about the replacing the conventional two-piece steel drive shaft with a one-piece carbon/epoxy. Design of composite drive shaft Classical Lamination Theory is used for the design of composite drive shaft. Finite element analysis (FEA) was used to design composite drive shafts incorporating carbon within an epoxy matrix. From experimental results, it was found that the developed one-piece automotive composite drive shaft had 64% mass reduction, 74% increase in torque capability compared with a conventional two-piece steel drive shaft. It also had 6380 rpm of natural frequency which was higher than the design specification of 3050 rpm. Index Terms: Bending frequency, Composite Materials, Drive shaft, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Power transmission, Torsion, Torsional buckling.