Design and Analysis of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) Leaf Spring

Weight reduction is now the main issue in automobile industries. Weight reduction can be achieved primarily by the introduction of better material, design optimization and better manufacturing processes. The achievement of weight reduction with adequate improvement of mechanical properties has made composite a very good replacement material for conventional steel. Selection of material is based on cost and strength of material. The composite materials have more elastic strain energy storage capacity and high strength to weight ratio as compared with those of steel, so multi-leaf steel springs are being replaced by mono-leaf composite springs. The paper gives the brief look on the suitability of composite leaf spring on vehicles and their advantages. The objective of the present work is design, analysis and fabrication of mono composite leaf spring. The design constraints are stress and deflections. The material selected is glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) and the epoxy resin can be used which is more economical to reduce total cost of composite leaf spring with similar mechanical and geometrical properties to the multileaf spring. The composite leaf spring is fabricated by hand lay-up technique and tested. The testing was performed experimentally with the help of UTM and by (FEA) using ANSYS software showing stresses and deflections were verified with analytical and experimental results. Compared to the steel spring, the composite spring has stresses that are much lower, the spring weight is nearly 74% lower.