Design, Simulation, and Prototyping of Single Composite Leaf Spring for Light Weight Vehicle
Reducing weight while increasing or maintaining strength of products is getting to be highly important research issue in this modern world. Composite materials are one of the material families which are attracting researchers and being solutions of such issue. In this project reducing weight of vehicles and increasing or maintaining the strength of their spare parts is considered. As leaf spring contributes considerable amount of weight to the vehicle and needs to be strong enough, a single E-glass/Epoxy leaf spring is designed and simulated following the design rules of the composite materials considering static loading only. The constant cross section design of leaf springs is employed to take advantages of ease of design analysis and its manufacturing process. And it is shown that the resulting design and simulation stresses are much below the strength properties of the material, satisfying the maximum stress failure criterion. The designed composite leaf spring has also achieved its acceptable fatigue life. This particular design is made specifically for light weight three wheeler vehicles. Its prototype is also produced using hand lay-up method.
