Production and optimization of hybrid filament wound drive shafts based on glass-basalt-carbon fibers

This work deals with production and optimization of a glass-basalt-carbon fiber based hybrid filament wound drive shaft that used as a power transmission component at passenger cars. Due to their anisotropic nature, composite materials requires more complex engineering practice than the conventional materials by means of production, design and optimization. Therefore, first of all, mechanical properties of composite materials must be revealed. In the sequel, for the purpose of getting some insight about tailoring the anisotropic properties of composite materials, a simpler problem, designing a composite cylinder for lateral compression strength is selected as a pre-study and in this process effectiveness of trial and error approach examined. Explicitly, increasing number and complexity of functional requirements will render the trial and error approach impractical. As a consequence, it is essential to state the design problem, within the context of mechanical properties of composite materials and functional requirements of the drive shaft, on a more rigorous mathematical basis. For this purpose, torque transmission and torsional buckling capabilities as well as natural bending frequency requirements of drive shaft is expressed in terms of orthotropic properties of laminated composites. By making use of this mathematical model, a particle swarm optimization algorithm which is convenient to use with filament winding method is constructed. It is shown that, the PSO algorithm is an effective way for producing optimal solutions, multi-objective optimization is possible by the use of hybrid composites and optimal solutions of hybrid systems can be improved by introducing more components with varying properties like the basalt fibers.