Composite Material: A Review over Current Development and Automotive Application

The importance of materials in modern world can be realized from the fact that much of the research is being done to apply new materials to different components. However it is natural for a design engineer to rely on trusted and tested materials, but now the world is changing .Today composite materials have changed all the material engineering. The evolution of composite materials has given an opportunity to various designers to use new and better materials resulting in cost reduction, increase in efficiency and better utilization of available resources. Composite materials are finding their applications in aerospace industry, automobile sector, manufacturing industries etc. This paper presents design method and vibrational analysis of composite propeller shafts. In this paper, the aim is to replace a metallic drive shaft by a two-piece composite drive shaft. Designing of a composite drive shaft is divided in two main sections: design of the composite shaft and design of couplings. In composite shaft design some parameters such as critical speed, static torque and adhesive joints are studied; the behavior of materials is considered nonlinear isotropic for adhesive, linear isotropic for metal and orthotropic for composite shaft. Along with the design all the analyses are performed using finite element software (ANSYS). The results show significant points about optimum design of composite drive shafts.