EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF CRANK SHAFT WITH CRACK OF A DIESEL ENGINE

Today, a number of small power plants base on Diesel engines are being installed. Such units are typically multi-cylinder engines and failure in any one of the engines could lead to shutting down of the entire plant. Cracks in crankshaft are one of the many causes for failure of such engines, which if not detected early could result in catastrophic failure. Hence, analysis of such system would give an insight into the modes of failure of the various parts of the system. The present work was prompted by a failure that occurred in an eighteen cylinder V- engine driven Power plant. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the response of a cracked crankshaft of a four stroke 18 V diesel engine. It is also proposed to determine transient response of the cracked crankshaft so that it can be compared with the response of the crankshaft without the crack. It is proposed to use Finite element analysis to find the transient response of the crankshaft with and without the crack. The crankshaft has been modeled using the 3D modeling software Pro/E. The model was then imported & meshed using 3D tetrahedral elements using HYPERMESH software. The meshed model was then imported to the ANSYS software to find out the transient response.