Reducing Effect of Bending Load and Torque Load on a Heavy Vehicle Front Axle Using Composites

An axle is a central shaft for a rotating wheel or gear. On wheeled vehicles, the axle may be fixed to the wheels, rotating with them, or fixed to its surroundings, with the wheels rotating around the axle. Conventionally the front axle is a dead axle. In such a case, the front axle beam is usually a drop forging of steel. This type of axle is no more used in modern cars, although it is still being used in heavier vehicles. The steels used for this are 0.4% carbon steel or 1.3% nickel steel. The axle has to take bending loads due to weight of the vehicle and also torque loads due to braking of the wheels. For this reason, front axle is made of I ? section in the central portion, while the ends are made either circular or elliptical. A downward sweep is given to the center portion to keep a low chassis height. In our project, a basic model of front axle is prepared. The optimization of front axle is done by varying materials and its cross section. The present used material used steel. Steel is replaced with Composite materials E-Glass Epoxy and S ? 2 Glass epoxy to reduce the weight of the axle. By reducing the weight, steering becomes easier. Pro/Engineer is used for modeling and ANSYS is used for analysis.