FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF MATERIAL EVALUATION FOR LIGHT WEIGHT VEHICLE MONO COMPOSITE LEAFSPRING

He composite materials emerging as more promising materials the automotive industry is looking to substitute the materials for the existing parts to reduce the weight and achieve the other benefits. The strain absorbing the elastic energy of these composite materials and weight to strength can be improved with altering the matrix and reinforcement combinations. The possibility of stiffness and load carrying capacity can be improved with weight reduction. The conventional leaf spring of SCV is selected for the analysis. Three different composite materials have been considered. They are E-glass/epoxy, graphite/epoxy and carbon/epoxy. The three mono composite leaf springs have been modeled by considering uniform thickness and uniform width cross- section. After modeling, static and dynamic analysis has been done using ANSYS FEA software and the results are compared with the analytical results. It is found that among the three different composite leaf springs, steel leaf spring can be replaced by E-glass / epoxy mono-composite leaf spring as the stresses are lower than the steel leaf spring and the stiffness is nearly equal. The stress is within the yield strength limit. The ANSYS results show that the weight of leaf spring reduced to 85% with EGlass/Epoxy Mono composite leaf spring.