Design Analysis of an Automotive Composite Drive Shaft

Abstract—Automotive drive Shaft is a very important components of vehicle. The present paper focuses on the design of such an automotive drive shat by composite materials. Now a days two pieces steel shaft are used as drive shaft. However, the main advantages of the present design is; only one piece of composite drive shat is possible that fulfil all the requirements of drive shaft. Two different designs are proposed, one is purely from Graphite/Epoxy lamina and other is using Aluminum with Graphite/Epoxy. The basic requirements considered here are torsional strength, torsional buckling and bending natural frequency. An optimum design of the draft shaft is done, which is cheapest and lightest but meets all of the above load requirements. Progressive failure analysis of the selected design is also done.