Improvement on Development of CAD Software for Shaft under Various Loading Conditions

In time past, designs of shafts were conservative in approach as relatively low working stresses were employed to cover up for unknown “Factors of Ignorance”. [1]. And where high stresses are involved, greater shaft dimension is employed for such design. This approach necessarily made the production cost high as quite a lot of materials are involved in such production. The primary reason for such approach is to safeguard the shaft failure in most operations. Unfortunately, the mechanism of failure mode was not well understood and because most of the applications in which shafts are employed are of great importance, which in some cases affects life negatively (i.e. involving loss of lives) and distortion of operations. Despite all these developments, designers are still faced with the problems of working with large numbers of formulas, computations and iteration procedures involved in the design of shafts. These have made the design procedures of shafts both cumbersome and rigorous, hence time consuming. This problem becomes more pronounced if the designer is interested in seeing the effects of the variation of one or more design parameter, this means he has to start again from scratch. Fortunately, these problems can be overcome if the various advantages, utilities and flexibilities which modern high – speed micro – computers offer are put into good use in the design of shafts. This study was carried out to design shaft under various loading conditions using Computer Aided Design, and results gotten proved that it saves wastage of materials, and it safes time as well A software package (or program) was developed using the formulas initially derived and a numerical procedure for computing the deflection using the double integration methods. The Programming language used was Visual Studio C#. This objective was achieved in part as the program so developed satisfactorily handle design based on strength and safety of the shaft.