EVALUATION OF STRUCTURAL AND VIBRATIONAL CHARACTERISTIC OF COMPOSITE DRIVE SHAFT FOR AUTOMOBILE USING FEM

In vehicle drive shaft is one of the most important component. It transmits torque from the engine to the differential gear of a rear wheel drive vehicle. Generally the drive shaft is mad e up of steel alloy but the use of conventional steel has disadvantages such as low specific stiffness and strength and high weight. Nowadays this steel drive shaft is replaced by composite material drive shaft. This advanced composite such as graphite, Ke vlar, carbon, glass with suitable resin have advantage of higher specific strength, less weight, high damping capacity, longer life, high critical speed and greater torque carrying capacity and can results in considerable amount of weight reduction as comp ared to steel shaft. The main objective of this research work is to study the structural and vibrational behavior of composite material drive shaft assembly as compared to conventional steel drive shaft. Heavy duty vehicle transmission drive shaft has been used for the project. The conventional material steel SM45C and three composite materials HS carbon epoxy, E - glass epoxy, HM carbon epoxy have been used for drive shaft study so as to determine the suitable composite replacement in order to optimize the p erformance and design. The drive shaft was modelled using the CREO 3.0 cad software and finite element analysis were done using ansys 14.0 FEA as an analysis tool for numerical simulation to find the dynamic vibration response of composite material drive. The simulation result determines the total deformation, Equivalent Von misses stress, Maximum shear stress, natural frequencies and mode shapes under actual boundary conditions. The result concluded that HS carbon epoxy composite material is suited more fo r composite drive shaft application as compared to other composite materials .