Selection of a Composite for an Automotive Drive Shaft

Work in groups of two to four. Collect information on the recycling programs in your home towns—that is, the types of materials that are collected, whether it is mandatory or voluntary, the amount of material processed per year, and what happens to it. Pay particular attention to plastics recycling. Compare your answers and prepare a short presentation to your class. 

Unlike ductile metals, composite laminates containing fiber-reinforced thermosetting polymers do not exhibit gross ductile yielding. However, they do not behave as classic brittle materials, either. Under a static tensile load, many of these laminates show nonlinear characteristics attributed to sequential ply failures. One of the difficulties, then, in designing with laminar composites is to determine whether the failure of the first ply constitutes material failure, termed first-ply failure (FPF), or if ultimate failure of the composite constitutes failure. In many laminar composites, ultimate failure occurs soon after first ply failure, so that an FPF design approach is justified, as illustrated for two common laminar composites in Table 8.9 (see Section 5.4.3 for information on the notations used for laminar composites). In fact, the FPF approach is used for many aerospace and aircraft applications. 

Material Laminate Stress MPa (ksi) Strain (%) Modulus, GPa (Msi) Stress, MPa (ksi) Strain (%) Modulus, GPa (Msi) 

Source P. K. Mallick, Fiber-Reinforced Composites. Copyright 1988 by Marcel Dekker, Inc. 

Design a driveshaft for an automobile. Specifically, there are five design criteria that must be met  

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SELECTION OF A COMPOSITE FOR AN AUTOMOTIVE DRIVE SHAFT 837 Table 8.10 Design Specifications for a Typical Automotive Driveshaft... 

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