DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF LEAF SPRING OF AUTOMOBILE

Abstract

- Material reduction plays a significant role in present day. Automobile industry is one of the major industries in the market which is looking for weight reduction for its various components like engine, chassis, leaf springs, bumper, steering column, etc. With material reduction, both cost and weight of the component reduces. Using composites instead of steel can reduce weight and cost for automobiles which is a good sign for manufacturers as well as customers. A wide research is going in market since many decades to reduce weight of the components using composite materials. Composites show good properties like good Weight to Strength ratio, good corrosion resistance, good life cycle, etc. which make manufacturers to choose composite materials instead of steel.
Agro-Based composites and Natural Fiber Composites are trending in today’s industry. They are now becoming substitute for other composites like Glass Fiber Composites because of their good properties like recyclability, good thermal and acoustical insulation properties, bio-degradability, low cost, availability, energy recovery, CO2 Sequestration enhanced etc., A study has been done on an automotive leaf spring to reduce weight using Agro Based Composite material and Natural Fiber Composite Materials instead of steel which is generally used. In this thesis, a comparative study has been done for a steel leaf spring and composite leaf spring using FEA. The behavior of both the materials has been compared. Leaf Spring is modeled using Pro-E. Finite element meshing has been done using Hypermesh. A basic static analysis has been done using Optistruct.