Fabrication and Experimental Analysis of Epoxy-Glass Fiber Composite Leaf Spring 2017-28-1985

Conventional materials like steel, brass, aluminum etc will fail without any indication, cracks initiation, propagation, will takes place with a short span. Now-a-days to overcome these problem, conventional materials are replaced by hybrid composite material. Not only have this conventional material failed to meet the requirement of high technology applications, like space applications and marine applications and structural applications in order to meet the above requirements new materials are being searched. Hybrid composites materials found to the best alternative with its unique capacity of designing the materials to give required properties and light weight. This paper aims to preparing hybrid composite using artificial fibers. Epoxy as resin and glass fiber as fiber for artificial hybrid composite to make a laminate for preparing leaf spring. The CAD models of composite Leaf spring and Steel leaf spring are prepared in Pro/Engineer software and imported in static structural analysis work bench of Ansys 14.5 software where Finite element analysis (FEA) is performed. And both composite and steel leaf spring specimens will be tested for their mechanical properties such as Deflection, bending stress, Stiffness, and weight to strength ratio and cost by using different machines and results will be compared. The design constraints are stresses and deflections. This study gives a comparative analysis between steel leaf spring and artificial hybrid composite leaf spring. The hybrid composite leaf spring is found to have lesser weight, lesser cost, lesser stresses and higher stiffness