Design and Development of Laminated Aluminum Glass Fiber Drive Shaft for Light Duty Vehicles
M. Arun1, K. Somasundara Vinoth2

1Arun M, Department of Production Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), India.
2K.Somasundara Vinoth, Assistant Professor and Research Scholar, Department of Production Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), India.
Manuscript received on 10 May 2013 | Revised Manuscript received on 18 May 2013 | Manuscript Published on 30 May 2013 | PP: 157-165 | Volume-2 Issue-6, May 2013 | Retrieval Number: F0824052613/13©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Abstract: A drive shaft, also known as a propeller shaft or cardan shaft, it is a mechanical part that transmits the torque generated by a vehicle’s engine into usable motive force to propel the vehicle. Now a day’s two piece steel shaft are mostly used as a drive shaft. The two-piece steel drive shaft consists of three universal joints, a center supporting bearing and a bracket, which increases the total weight of an automotive vehicle and decreases fuel efficiency. This work deals with the replacement of conventional two piece steel drive shafts with a one piece Hybrid Aluminum E glass/epoxy composite drive shaft for an automotive application. The basic requirements considered here are torsional strength, torsional buckling and bending natural frequency. A hybrid of Aluminum and E-glass/epoxy as in which the aluminum has a role to transmit the required torque, while the E-Glass epoxy composite increases the bending natural frequency . An experimental study was carried out to study the static torsion capability .Four cases were studied using aluminum tube wounded by different layers of composite materials. Results obtained from this study show that increasing the number of layers would enhance the maximum static torsion approximately 66% for [+45/-45]3s laminates higher than the pure aluminum and mass reduction of 42% compared with of steel drive shaft. A one-piece hybrid composite full drive shaft is optimally analyzed using Finite Element Analysis Software and simulation results were compared with the existing steel drive shaft .
Keywords: One-Piece Hybrid Aluminum/Composite Drive Shaft, Static Torque Capability, Buckling Torque Capability ,Bending Natural Frequency, E-Glass Fiber ,Static Analysis, Modal Analysis, ANSYS.

Scope of the Article: Radio Over Fiber