DESIGN AND FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF HYBRID COMPOSITES MONO LEAF SPRING

Recently the automobile industries are showing profound interest in the replacement of steel springs with composite leaf springs. The objective of this paper is to study and compare the load carrying capacity and weight savings of mono leaf composite spring with that of steel leaf spring and hence obtain the suitable spring of minimum weight proficient of bearing a given static load without failure. The design constraints are stress and deflection. Employing the results of the steel leaf spring, a hybrid composite spring composed of E-glass/Epoxy and Carbon/Epoxy is designed and analyzed using ANSYS. The finite element results displaying stresses and deflections are plotted. Compared to the conventional steel spring, the hybridized composite spring experience far lower stresses and the spring weight without eye units is nearly 55% lower, 70% lesser stress.