Samantha Huselstein

P15482
Strength and Fatigue Analysis of Shredder Shaft

Question: Will our shaft break?

Background: The shredder shaft and blades is one of the main components to this device. If the shaft
does not have infinite life, shaft may fail and Haitian farmers will have no way to repair the device. By
performing this analysis we can show that durability of our product is sufficient and that it is “reparable
in Haiti” (by the fact that it shouldn’t need repairing).

Assumptions:

1. 416 Steel for blades and shaft

2. Pinned joints at either end of shaft
3. 2 different loading cases
a. Typical: All 9 blades are engaged
b. Worst case: Only the 9th blade is engaged
4. It takes approximately 25 ft-lb of torque to crush/shred breadfruit
a. This comes from our prototype data
5. Number of blades is 9 per shaft
6. Weight of spacers are negligible
7. Weight of shaft is negligible
8. Weight of blades are negligible *** for deflection calculation only
9. Breadfruit is engaged at 45o from z-axis
10. Use singularity functions for shear and moment of shaft
11. Both shafts will see the same forces
12. Breadfruit force is applied tangentially to circular blade (as opposed to normal to the “hook”
face)
13. Use Shigley’s book to get stress concentrations
14. To account for keyway in safety factor, multiply by 75%
15. Deflection Calculations
a. Neglect weight of blades
b. Assume shaft is 1 diameter (choose smallest diameter)
c. E of 416 Steel is 29000000 psi (from matweb.com)
d. Use superposition

Tools used:

MatLab, Machinery’s Handbook, singularity function code from online source

Equations from Shigley’s Mechanical Engineering Design

Analysis:

See uploaded code: Shaft_P15482_Rev5

 Samantha Huselstein
P15482
Strength and Fatigue Analysis of Shredder Shaft
Schematic:

θ
 Samantha Huselstein
P15482
Strength and Fatigue Analysis of Shredder Shaft
Results:

Figure 1: These graphs show the Shear and Moment diagrams for a normal loading case (where all 9 blades are
engaged)
 Samantha Huselstein
P15482
Strength and Fatigue Analysis of Shredder Shaft

Figure 2: These plots show the Shear and Moment diagrams for a worst case scenario (only the 9th blade is
engaged)
 Samantha Huselstein
P15482
Strength and Fatigue Analysis of Shredder Shaft

Figure 3: These plots show the torsion in the shaft (created by opposing gear and breadfruit forces) in both the
normal and worst case loading scenarios
 Samantha Huselstein
P15482
Strength and Fatigue Analysis of Shredder Shaft

Figure 4: This plot shows the deflection in the shaft with a worst case scenario (as described above in
assumptions). Note that the x-axis is * 10^-3

Safety Factor for Shaft without Key Safety Factor for Shaft with Key
595 446
1182 886
14772 11079
32381 24286
2753 2065
4437 3328
1538 1154
Table 1: This table shows the calculated safety factors at each step in the shaft design.

Conclusions/Action Items:

The shaft will support the system with infinite fatigue life. The next step will be to have a subject matter
expert (Dr. DeBartolo) sign off once all the final dimensions and materials are input to the MatLab code.

We also want to look into a key that will shear if the machine is overloaded (ex: a rock falls in). This
would be to minimize damage to the blades.