leaf spring

Present time the main issue of automobile industry are weight reduction. The automobile industry has looking for any implementation or modification to reduce the weight of the vehicle. The suspension leaf spring is one of the potential items for weight reduction in automobile as it accounts for 10 % to 20 % of the unsprung weight. The introduction of composite leaf spring made of E-glass fiber epoxy resin has made it to possible to reduce the weight of spring without any reduction on load carrying capacity and stiffness. The achievement of weight reduction with adequate improvement of mechanical properties has made composite a very good replacement material for conventional steel spring. This work deals with the replacement of multi-leaf steel spring with mono composite leaf spring for the LCV Carrying capacity and stiffness. The design constraints were limiting stresses and displacement. Modeling and analysis of both the steel and composite leaf springs have been done using ANSYS 1...

Overall Weight reduction of the vehicle is the main issue in automobile industries. Weight reduction can be achieved primarily by the introduction of better material, design optimization and better manufacturing processes. In this paper main focus is to review all such work in which the weight reduction of the vehicle was achieved by considering leaf spring. Many of authors suggested that weight reduction can be achieved by using composite material having suitable properties and capable of carrying such heavy load of the vehicle. Different methods for analysing and manufacturing for composite leaf spring are also discussed. It was shown that the weight reduction can be easily achieved but there are more aspects which should also be consider i.e. cost, new composite materials. Keywords— leaf spring, composite material E-glass/Epoxy.