CRITICAL SPEED ANALYSIS OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE, HOLLOW DRIVE SHAFTS

A theoretical analysis is presented for determining the critical speeds of a rotating circular cylindrical hollow shaft with layers of arbitrarily laminated composite materials by means of the thin- and thick-shell theories. The theory used is the dynamic analog of the Sanders best first approximation shell theory. By means of tracers, the analysis can be reduced to that of various simpler shell theories, i.e. Love's first approximation, Loo's, Morley's and Donnell's shell theories and, also, to that of the more precise, but complicated Flugge's shell theory. The theories include the combined effects of torsion and rotation. The rotational effects contain the centrifugal and Coriolis forces. As an example of the application of the theory, a closed form solution is presented for a simply supported drive shaft. In order to validate the analysis, numerical results are compared with existing results for various special cases. Also, the effects of the various shell theories, thickness shear flexibility and bending-twisting coupling on the critical speed are investigated.