Development of composite drive shaft tube for automotive industry

Abstract

Weight, vibration, fatigue, and critical speed limitations have been recognized as serious problems in drive shafts in automotive industry for many years. Conventional drive shaft is made up into two parts to increase its fundamental natural bending frequency. This present work deals with the replacement of conventional steel drive shaft with a composite counterparts. The benefits of eliminating the two piece shafts are significant reductions in weight, noise, vibration and harshness. In this work, one-piece propeller shaft composed of carbon/epoxy and glass/epoxy composites have been designed and manufactured for a rear wheel drive automobile. The performance measures are static torque transmission capability, torsional buckling and the fundamental natural bending frequency. The tubular composite shaft samples are being manufactured by using filament winding technique. To predict the torsional properties, fatigue life and failure modes of composite tubes for different fiber orientation angle and stacking sequence, finite element analysis (FEA) has been used. The predicted and experimental values has been reported for comparison. The next phase of work consists of optimization of shaft for the objective function as weight and fundamental natural frequency considering different stacking sequence and fiber orientation. © CCM 2020 - 18th European Conference on Composite Materials. All rights reserved.