MODELLING AND ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE LEAF SPRING UNDER THE STATIC LOAD CONDITION USING FEA

Leaf springs are heart of automobile suspension system. This suspension system has great functions of avoid transmission of shocks from unevenness of roads and also, to avoid damage to the vehicle. Conventional leaf springs are manufactured of stainless steel. This stainless steel is very good at absorbing shocks. As time passed and coming to present days, where there is a need for reducing vehicle weights many automobile components are being replaced with light-weight composite materials. In our analysis we are creating a sample model of a composite leaf spring and comparing the values with the conventional stainless steel leaf spring. For simplicity purpose, we considered only a single leaf spring consisting only one leaf. By changing the different values of some mechanical properties such like density, tensile strength we can arrive at a compromised design of leaf spring such that here the composite leaf spring will be able to absorb greater loads and vibrations and shocks as compared to stainless steel leaf spring. The material used here is Epoxy uni-directional glass which is available in ANSYS. The version used in 2022 R1. The mechanical properties can be altered and we can assign our desired values simply using ANSYS. Procedure for analysis is done by FEA (finite element analysis) where a large material is splitted into small finite elements and analysis is carried out on each finite element to obtain results. Generally, discretization of domain, mesh generation are steps followed in FEA. Then generated mesh is subjected to various loads for analysis.