Design and Fabrication of Composite Leaf Spring for Light Vehicle

In recent year weight reduction is most important research in Automobile industry. Reduction of weight while increasing or maintaining good strength of products is most important in the modern world. And this weight reduction is possible by introducing Composite materials .Therefore composite materials are solution of such type of problems. By using composite material we design a composite leaf spring for suspension system of light weight vehicle. In this we describe design and analysis of composite leaf spring. The objective of our product is to compare the strength and weight of composite leaf spring with that of steel leaf spring. Now a day’s industries are interested for replacement of steel leaf spring with that of composite leaf spring, because the composite materials has high strength to weight ratio, good corrosion resistance & low weight. There are different composite materials. The material selection depends upon availability of resource and also depends on its properties. In our project high strength with low weight composite material is required because it is used in suspension system. The composite materials E-glass epoxy, carbon epoxy, graphite epoxy, polythelylene terephthalate, polytetrafluoroethylene are actually used. The most preferable composite material is glass fiber reinforced polymer (E-glass epoxy). The strength of composite multi leaf spring varies in percentage is depending on material selection. If we use E-glass epoxy then about 60-70% weight reduction is possible. The design of model will be done on CATIA & analysis on ANSYS.