Static and dynamic characteristics of a hybrid aluminium/composite drive shaft

A static torque and power transmission capacities of a hybrid aluminium/composite drive shaft, fabricated by a wetted filament winding method, were investigated. Special mechanisms for static torsion and power transmission test setups were designed and fabricated. The following different fibre types were used: carbon, glass, one epoxy, and hardener. The static and dynamic characteristic of the hybrid aluminium/composite drive shaft with respect to the fibre types stacking sequences winding angle and number of layers were investigated. From the experiments, it was found that the static and dynamic torque capacity for a winding angle of 45° is higher than 90° for both glass and carbon fibres. From the power transmission test, it was also found that the percentage between the static torque and dynamic torque is approximately 7-15 per cent. In addition, in the static torsion test, the aluminium tube yielded first at the central region of the shaft, followed by crack propagation in the composite shaft along the fibre direction, which eventually caused the delamination of the composite layers from the aluminium tube. On the other hand, in the power transmission test, different locations of failure were observed along the gauge length of the specimen. The shaft's being laminated with a stacking sequence of [90/ + 45/-45/90] and [+45/ -45/90/90] resulted in the same behaviour in the torque-angle and the twist relation. The power transmission capacities were close to each other and this in turn satisfied the lamination theory. The finite-element method was used to analyse the hybrid shaft under static torsion and ANSYS finite-element software was used to perform the numerical analysis for the hybrid shaft. A full scale hybrid specimen analysis was done. Elasto-plastic properties were used for the aluminium tube and linear elastic for composite materials. Good agreement was obtained between the finite-element predictions and experimental results.