Design, Analysis and Fabrication of Composite Leaf Spring

Abstract

Abstract

Nowadays composite materials are one of the materials which are greatly attracting researchers. Reducing weight and increasing or maintaining the strength of materials is getting to be highly important research issue in this modern world. In this paper, design, fabrication and analysis of composite leaf spring have been presented. The objective is to design a composite leaf spring with reduced length and weight as compared to steel leaf spring. The automobile industry has great interest for replacement of steel leaf spring with that of composite leaf spring since the composite materials have excellent strength-to-weight ratio, good corrosion resistance, wider choice of the materials, dimensional stability, high impact strength, light weight and ease of manufacturing. The material used for this work is glass fiber reinforced polymer (e-glass/epoxy), Dobeckot 520 F Hardener 758. The design parameters are selected and analyzed with the objective of minimizing weight of the composite leaf spring as compared to the steel leaf spring. Compared to steel spring, weight reduction of 76.22% is achieved by using optimized composite leaf spring. The leaf spring was modelled in PRO-E WILDFIRE 4.0 and the analysis was done using SOLIDWORKS 2013 software.

Keywords: Stiffness, composite leaf spring, steel leaf spring, PRO-E WILDFIRE 4.0, SOLIDWORKS 2013