2012. Design of a composite drive shaft and its coupling for automotive application

ABSTRACT This paper presents a design method and a vibration analysis of a carbon/epoxy composite drive shaft. The design of the composite drive shaft is divided into two main sections: First, the design of the composite shaft and second, the design of its coupling. Some parameters such as critical speed, static torque, fiber orientation and adhesive joints were studied. Tsai-Hill failure criterion was implemented to control the rupture resistance of the composite shaft and then its critical speed analysis and modal analysis were carried out using ANSYS. The behavior of materials is considered nonlinear isotropic for adhesive, linear isotropic for metal and orthotropic for composite shaft. The results showed significant points about the appropriate design of composite drive shafts. The substitution of composite drive shaft has resulted in considerable weight reduction about 72% compared to conventional steel shaft. Furthermore, results revealed that the orientation of fibers had great influence on the dynamic characteristics of the composite shaft

Achieving robust acoustic emission-based damage characterisation of scaled laminated composites under indentation

This paper presents a novel investigation on the robustness of Acoustic Emission (AE) technique on the characterization of indentation-induced Damage Mechanisms (DMs) in scaled laminated composites. AE is used to monitor a comprehensive series of scaled Quasi-Static Indentation (QSI) tests performed on Quasi-Isotropic (QI) S-glass/8552 epoxy composite plates, with in-plane and intra-plane scaling. A detailed assessment of the damage evolution is carried out through clustering of the monitored AE signals. The AE results indicated the existence of different DMs such as delamination, matrix cracking and fiber breakage. Ultrasonic C-scan and visual observations were also used to verify the AE based results. It was observed that both in-plane and intra-plane scaling alter the induced DMs, and the AE analysis was able to accurately identify and quantify the DMs in each case. However, the AE features (frequency, energy and count) were found to be dependent on different variables such as size, geometry and stacking sequence of the investigated samples. This research highlights the potential and challenges to develop AE as a reliable structural health monitoring system for impact/indentation damage monitoring of composite plates over a range of sizes and complexities