Design and fatigue analysis of drive shaft by using Finite Element method and CATIA software

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to investigate the design and fatigue analysis of stresses & deflections of drive shaft subjected to combine bending & torsion by using Finite element (FEM) and (CATIA) software. Then checking for fatigue life as well as compare the results with analytical calculations to verify the accuracy of the results. The drive shaft is a critical component used in paper-converting machines. It carries a load of two vacuum rollers weighing around 1471N and rotates at 1000 rpm, also subjected to the reaction force. This shaft has key slots at the area of change in cross sections giving rise to localized stress concentration. As the pressure load on the shaft is found to be stressing the material well below its yield point stress, the High Cycle Fatigue analysis (HCF) is chosen and the estimated S-N diagram for the material of the shaft gave an estimated life equal to 20,934 cycles analytically. The Finite Element Modeling and analysis of the shaft performed using ANSYS resulted in a fatigue life of 20935 cycles corresponding to cumulative fatigue damage equal to 0.7. The ANSYS result for Maximum stress and Deflection are 41.89Mpa and 0.045 respectively. Similarly, Maximum stress and Deflection are 41Mpa and 0.039 respectively from the analytical results. As can be seen, the FEM-based analysis and the analytical results do match very well.