Computer-aided design of power shafts for various design theories

Computer-aided design of shafts transmitting power between rotating elements is attempted. Such shafts need to be designed to survive against fatigue failures, and still be optimum using minimum amounts of material and should also satisfy the strength and deflection restrictions. Since there are a number of failure theories, the designers should preferably use each to check the results for safety. The method and the interactive program developed and presented in this paper enables the designer to use a menu driven procedure to carry out the computations and optimization and provides graphical output on shear-force, bending moment, slope and deflection curves to evaluate the performance of the design. The program is written using FORTRAN and PLOT 10.