Abstract
In order to reduce the booming noise caused by first bending mode of a drive shaft, this paper proposes a simulation program for prediction of the bending mode frequency of any tubular shaft. This program consists of a pre-processor for modeling of geometrical shape of the drive shaft with boundary conditions of various joints, a processor for constructing of global finite element matrices using beam elements and an eigen-solver based on MATLAB program. Using this simulation program, the effective and accurate FE model far a shaft attached to vehicle can be obtained by aid of database for stiffness of each joint. Thus the resonance frequencies and mode shapes of a shaft can be calculated accurately. Because the effect of the resonance on interior noise can be verified, more improved shaft will be proposed at the early stage of design.
