1.

Introduction
In the present era the demand of greater performance, long life and reduce weight require constant
improvement of nearly all parts of automotive. Furthermore, the existing products are modified,
and old products are replaced by new material or advanced products due to growing competition
and innovative development in automotive industry, on the other hand the suspension system of
automobiles are also developing regularly. Leaf springs and helical springs are commonly used in
suspension system of automobiles, but leaf springs are used frequently as compared to helical
spring due to their better tendency to absorb shock loads in heavy vehicles.

The leaf spring suspension systems are the key elements for reducing weight in automobiles thus
minimizing the unsprung weight, due to this reason fuel efficiency and riding quality increases.
Also enhanced material properties cause the reduction in weight and increases strength, which is
also achieved by design optimization and improved manufacturing processes. Research revealed
that the use of composite materials for leaf spring can have significant weight savings and can be
efficiently used for light weight vehicles.

With the utilization of composite materials, it is possible to minimize the weight exclusive of
reduction in the weight carrying capacity and rigidity. Another advantage of composite material is
that they have large amount of elastic strain energy storage capacity and provide high strength to
weight ratio in correspondence to conventional leaf spring.

A composite material consists of mixture of two or more materials that have aggregate properties
of the combination of two materials and it differs than its constituents can attain separately. The
focus of this project is to sort out the best composite material, which have significant properties to
meet the requirement of high strength to weight ratio.
2. Literature Review
2.1 What is Leaf Spring?
A leaf spring is an elementary form of spring which is commonly used for the suspension in
vehicles. Firstly, they are called as laminated or carriage spring, and occasionally they are referred
to as a semi-elliptical spring or cart spring, it is the earliest times of springing.

A leaf spring takes the form of a slim arc-shaped length of steel spring of rectangular cross-section.
It consists of span, main leaf, eye holes, camber and auxiliary leaves. In the most ordinary
arrangement, the center of the arc-shaped leaves provides locality for the axle, while eye hole
formed at either end offer attachment to the vehicle chassis. In heavy vehicles, a leaf spring can
be made from several leaves called auxiliary leaves which are piled up on each other in numerous
layers, often with increasingly shorter leaves. Leaf springs provide damping as well as springing
functions. Although it is not well controlled and results in stiction of auxiliary leaves. For this
reason, some manufacturers prefer to use mono-leaf springs.

A leaf spring can either be attached directly to the structure at both ends or attached directly at one
end, usually the front, with the other end attached through a shackle, a short swinging arm. The
shackle allows the leaf spring to elongate when compressed and thus makes for softer springiness.
Some springs have concave end, called a spoon end, to carry a swiveling member.

3. History
Leaf springs were commonly used in automobiles, right up to the 1970s in Europe and Japan and
late 1970s in America. However, manufacturers uses coil spring instead of leaf spring. Now a
days leaf springs are widely used in almost every vehicle such as van, jeeps, trucks and railway
carriages. In heavy vehicles, leaf springs lead the load to spread widely over the vehicles chassis
and hence it has a great advantage over the coil springs which transmits the load to a single point
on vehicle body.

The advantage of leaf springs over coil spring is that it locates the rear axle and helps in the
elimination of pan hard rod and trailing arms, hence minimizing the cost and weight in vehicle rear
suspension also it is guided along a definite path whereas helical spring position at a single point
on the rear axle.

An additional contemporary achievement is the parabolic leaf spring in which less number of
leaves is held together in a sandwich structure with varying thickness from center to ends thus
acquires a parabolic shape. The friction between the leaves is unnecessary so the only point of
contact lies at the end of the leaves and at the center point with which axel is connected.

The major benefit of parabolic spring is that they are flexible and light weight which enhances the
quality of vehicle ride. Moreover, parabolic leaf springs provides comfortable ride and are not stiff
as other conservative multi leaf springs. Due to their fine properties they are widely used in heavy
vehicles like buses to provide comfortable ride. Besides parabolic leaf springs, an additional
development was made by the British GKN company and by Chevrolet which includes the
replacement of steel leaf spring by composite plastic leaf springs; however, this type of leaf springs
needs strong dampers and shock absorbers due to lost friction between leaves and internal damping
effects.

Usually when leaf springs are used in vehicle suspension, it leads to issue known as axle tramp
resulting in the mishandling due to natural flexibility in the spring causes the unsprung mass of
axle to lose precise control. Most often, this drawback can be diminished by the utilization of
Wattss link and radius arms to position the axle and can have softer spring ensuring better ride.
The rear suspension of such type of designs includes variety of Austin-Healey 3000 and Fiat 128
suspension.

Types of Leaf Springs:

There were different types of leaf springs which include the following:

1. Elliptic
2. Semi-Elliptic
3. Three quarter-Elliptic
4. Quarter Elliptic
5. Transverse
Elliptical leaf springs consist of two circular arcs joined together at their ends; one of arc center
was joined to the frame whereas the bottom arc center was joined to the front axle. Trailing arms
are needed for elliptical leaf spring, but semi-elliptical does not require these additional
components. The other type of leaf spring Quarter-elliptic springs were consisting of thick
mass of leaves, forced into a position in the rear end region of ladder frame whereas the other
free end is connected to the differential.

3.1 Characteristics
The leaf spring suspension systems are strong and simple in design and it behaves like a connection
for axle to hold it in the position and therefore no additional linkages are required. Leaf springs
with high value of spring constant are desirable because they assist the position of axle, due to this
reason and including inter leaf friction the riding comfort was greatly affected. The damping of
spring motion gets reduced due to inter leaf friction and causes lessen spring back affect. The effect
of acceleration and torque produce during braking causes oscillations wind-up which effect rear-
end squat and nose-diving. Leaf springs were widely used and had great advantages over helical
springs.

3.2 Manufacturing process

Multi-leaf springs are made by the following manufacturing process:

1. Shearing of flat bar

2. Center hole punching / Drilling
3. Heating process (hot & cold process)
4. Eye Forming / Wrapper Forming
5. Diamond cutting / end trimming / width cutting / end tapering
6. End punching / end grooving / end bending / end forging / eye grinding / end rolling
7. Center hole punching / Drilling / nibbling
8. Heat Treatment
9. Heating
10. Hardening
11. Cambering
 12. Quenching
13. Tempering
14. Surface preparation
15. Shot peening / stress peening
16. Primary painting
17. Eye bush preparation process
18. Eye reaming / eye boring
19. Bush insertion
20. Bush reaming
21. Assemble
22. Presetting & load testing
23. Finish painting
24. Marking & packing

3.3 Impact of various materials on leaf spring performance

In engineering practices variety of different materials are used which differ in their properties from
one another. However, the use of composite materials is of great significance in daily life practices
due to their superior properties than other type of materials. Moreover, by the use of composite
material rather than mild steel, the displacement values are higher. Modal analysis results predict
that the vibrations generated by composite materials are less than that of steel due to less frequency.

3.4 Introduction to Buckling Analysis Method

A brief introduction of buckling method is given below:

3.4.1 Definition of Buckling Analysis

The method used to analyze the loads at which buckling occurs and the characteristic change in
the shape due to buckling loads. It is to be noted that buckling loads are critical loading at which
the characteristic shape of the structure changes or deforms which is known as buckled mode
shape.
3.4.2 Types of Buckling Analyses
There are two types of methods that are available in ANSYS software to compute the loading at
which buckling occurs and also the characteristic shape of the structure i.e. buckling mode shapes:

1. Linear (eigenvalue) buckling analysis

2. Nonlinear buckling analysis

The characteristics of these two methods yield different results, the detail description of these
methods are mentioned below.

5.6.2.1 Eigenvalue Buckling Analysis

This type of analysis is also known as linear buckling analysis. It is usually used and easily
executed but it provides unconservative results due to which it should not be used in actual
engineering practices. The linear buckling analysis computes the magnitude of buckling loads and
buckling mode shapes that are coupled with these loads. Finite element analysis provides the
computation of buckling load factors (BLF) that are associated with buckling modes. To obtain
the magnitude of buckling load, BLF which is expressed in terms of numerical value is multiplied
or divided with buckling load applied depending upon the package of the Finite element analysis
software.

5.6.2.2 Nonlinear Buckling Analysis

In nonlinear buckling analysis, the load is applied in more than one step or multiple steps rather
than in one single step as done in linear analysis. The incremental changes in the loads cause the
change in the shape of the structure which in turn changes the stiffness of the structure; hence the
stiffness of the structure should be updated after each increment. The approach which is known as
load control method, each load step is defined manually by the user or may be defined
automatically hence distinction displacement among two successive steps are not very large.

In this approach, which is called the load control method, load steps are defined either by the user
or automatically so the distinction in displacement between the two consecutive steps is not too
large. Since this approach is accurate so it is suggested to use it for design of authentic structures.
However, to predict the load level at which the structure becomes unstable, a technique is used
which employ a nonlinear static analysis.