Development of automotive tubular driveshaft using the rotary swaging process

Abstract

The present study has been carried out to investigate the driving performance characteristics for the vibration and torsional strength of the automotive tubular driveshaft manufactured by a rotary swaging process. A maximum torque and a total number of torsional repetitions for the tubular driveshaft is measured to know the respective strengths through the static torsion test and torsional endurance test. The weight of the tubular driveshaft product is reduced by about 12.8 per cent over that of the solid driveshaft with the same performance. The stiffness of the tubular driveshaft is greater than that of the solid driveshaft because the natural frequency of the tubular driveshaft is higher by about 21 per cent than that of the solid driveshaft in the experiment. The total number of the torsional repetitions up to the fracture for the tubular driveshaft is greater than 250 000. From these results, the tubular driveshaft has been proven to be more useful in many aspects such as weight reduction and improvement of vibration and stiffness characteristics compared to the solid driveshaft.