Design of Rear Axle Shaft for Light Weight Green Vehicle
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Date
2018-03
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Publisher
AAU
Abstract
Vehicle weight reduction is a known strategy to address growing concerns about greenhouse gas
emissions and fuel use by passenger vehicles.
This paper intended to reduce the weight of rear axle shaft by replacing the existing material solid
alloy steel with the material, hybrid of AISI4140 steel with carbon fiber/epoxy material. This thesis
starts with by taking the measurement of commercially available rear axle shaft dimensions, which
is 35mm diameter, 5.3064kg mass for single shaft and 0.66m length made of chrome molybdenum
semi-floating steel shaft. Analyzing the equivalent stress, total deformation and mass of the shaft
for making the values as a baseline for the light weight design. Obtaining the analysis for hollow
shaft and hybrid shaft with 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 (mm) diameter hole using ANSYS 15 software
and comparing the result to the baseline shaft value determined. The values of stress to percentage
reduction ratio can be selected as optimum solution for the thesis.
The weight of the shaft could be significantly reduced by removing the inside of the shaft and
replacing it with a lower density material. Based on the study performed, the weight of the axle
shaft could be reduced by more than 10 % without significant amount of stress raise. Therefore,
14mm cylindrical hole from AISI4140 alloy steel axle shaft replaced by 14mm carbon fiber epoxy
shaft is the optimum choice. This can achieve 12.45% mass reduction which is 1.32kg of
unnecessary mass can be reduced from the vehicle weight with 0.8% stress rise, the stress is kept
between 248.49 MPa - 241.61 MPa.
Description
Keywords
Hybrid, Semi-floating, full-floating, three-quarter floating, weight reduction, light weight design, shaft, fiber, epoxy, steel