Benchmark Cases - Drive shaft

• With ESAComp, a drive shaft with a constant or axially varying laminate lay-up can be defined efficiently. The shaft may include local reinforcement. Also conical shafts can be modeled.
• The shaft can be loaded, for example, with torque, axial force and initial eccentricity of the shaft ends.
• The analysis tools help in finding the optimal flexibility and sufficient safety in terms of ply failure and global stability. The natural frequency analysis can be used in the design process to avoid exciting the structure in the operating environment.
• The benchmark case [1] studies the shear buckling of various composite drive shafts under torsion. The ESAComp results are in line with the published data. When the simulation is reproduced with Ansys using similar composite shell elements as in ESAComp, it is found out that the buckling mode shapes are identical and that ESAComp predicts, on average, 5% higher buckling loads for the 5 shaft configurations.



• Reference:
  [1] Shokrieh M., Hasani A. and Lessard L., Shear buckling of a composite drive shaft under torsion, Composite Structures 64 (2004) 63–69.