COMPARATIVE FE ANALYSIS OF AUTOMOTIVE LEAF SPRING USING COMPOSITE MATERIALS

In today's competitive world of the automobile industry, it is found that the continuous emergence of environmental issues, hiking of price in all respect, it is necessary to find the solution and analyse the few parameters such as weight reduction, optimise the design in the automotive component. In this paper, the material comparison have been considered and applied to the geometric model of the leaf spring, which is a very important component of the automobile segment. The geometric model of leaf spring with steel and composite material is established using the three dimensional software and then imported into the higher end finite element software to analyze its strength such as stress, deflection, and stiffness. The weights of two sheet plates have been considered for both steel and composite material and compared the weight reduction. The result showed that the E glass fibre composite leaf spring of two sheet plate has an 80% weight reduction as compared to the traditional steel leaf spring. This comparison showed remarkable the strength effect and the reduction in cost effectiveness can be easily achieved in the production sector.