Design and Manufacturing of Laminated Spring: A New Approach Based On Composites

A laminated spring or a leaf spring, being one of the overriding components of an automobile suspension system is nowadays, considered to be a potential factor for reducing vehicle weight.With the advent of composite materials, it has been possible to reduce the weight of the leaf spring without any reduction in the load carrying capacity and stiffness.Composites are well suited for leaf spring applications due to their high strength to weight ratio, fatigue resistance and natural frequency.The achievement of weight reduction with apposite improvement of mechanical properties has made composites an excellent replacement for conventional steels.The present work is an endeavour to provide the readers as well as the industry with an exclusive construction technique regardingcomposite leaf springs based on an experimental affirmation.Apart from that, the present work converges itself towards the comparative study of steels and composites for the bending stress evaluation and distribution associated with two different categories of leaves in the new construction method based on the rule of mixtures; which again has been one of the parts of the recent developments cognated with the composite leaf springs.The laminated spring was modeled in CATIA V5R18 and the same were analyzed under similar conditions using ANSYS (Workbench 16.2) software considering Structural-Steel and Carbon fiber Steel as the spring material for respective studies.Finally, software based results are presented and compared for two distinct cases mentioned above.