• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.88-94
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• 2012

An axle drive shaft with double joint shaft, cross kit and yoke has an important role by transferring power and changing steering angle between axle and wheel in power train system. It has been used widely in the heavy machinery requiring a high reliability in the power train system. At fatigue failures of the axle drive shaft with the long span, a relatively high stress concentration at a snap ring groove on the drive shaft brings to significant fatigue damages under repeated loading condition. As Peterson's suggestions on this study, a relief groove in the vicinity of the snap ring groove is applied by decreasing the stress concentration and improving the fatigue life of axle drive shaft. By using FEM analysis, the decreasing effect of the stress concentration and extended fatigue life are due to the change of design parameters related with size and location of the relief groove. The relief groove with the design parameters such as d/b=2.0 and r/h=1.2 enables to decrease the stress concentration of 22.3% and increase the fatigue life more than 3 times by comparing with no relief groove application.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.273-281
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• 2010

In this paper, a method to predict the fatigue life of an axle drive shaft by the calibrated accelerated life test (CALT) method is proposed. The CALT method is very effective for predicting lifetimes, significantly reducing test time, and quantifying reliability. The fatigue test is performed by considering two high stress and one low stress levels, and the lifetime at the normal stress level is predicted by extrapolation. In addition, in this study, the major reliability parameters such as the lifetime, accelerated power index, shape parameter, and scale parameter are determined by conducting various experiments. The lifetime prediction of the axle drive shaft is verified by comparing the experimental results with load spectrum data. The results confirm that the CALT method is effective for lifetime prediction and requires a short test time.