Stress Analysis of Composite Leaf Spring-Comparative Approach

Abstract

Automobile manufacturers are focusing on weight reduction for saving natural resources and enhancing the fuel efficiency; automobiles are sharing almost half of the world's fuel consumption and a major source of pollution, thus reducing the weight will directly result in the reduction of fuel consumption. The leaf spring is one of the main candidates for the weight reduction in an automobile as they still holds the worth although many shocks absorbing devices are in the market these days. This paper is aimed to present the comparative study of steel and composite leaf spring with the later type having the same geometrical characteristics of steel leaf spring. Validations are carried out by modelling leaf spring on ANSYS and comparing it with analytical results. The results showed that the stresses in composite leaf spring are 64.8% lower than the stresses in the steel leaf spring for the same geometrical characteristics. The results for deflections showed also good agreement with analytical results and a decrement of 51.3% is found for composite leaf spring. The proposed methodology helps us to reduce the weight of leaf spring by approximately 74.39% without compromising on allowable stresses and thus also increasing the strain energy of the particular leaf spring.