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 automobile industry has shown increased interest in the replacement of steel spring with fiberglass composite leaf spring due to high strength to weight ratio. The introduction of FRP material has made it possible to reduce the weight of spring without any reduction on load carrying capacity. Therefore the aim of this project is to design and fabricate a complete mono composite leaf spring.

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. This project gives the brief look on the suitability of composite leaf spring on vehicles and their advantages.

In this project, . E-Glass/Epoxy Composite Leaf Spring are considered.They are designed based on the standard design formulae provided by SAE. They are then modeled in Pro/E and imported to ANSYS Workbench, where they are analyzed for static load condition.

A prototype of E-Glass/Epoxy leaf spring is fabricated following the conventional hand lay-up process and subjected to free vibration and forced (harmonic) vibration tests. The result is validated with the corresponding FEA results obtained from ANSYS.

In ANSYS, pre-stressed modal analysis is performed on all the composite leaf springs to determine their natural resonating frequencies. They are further subjected to random vibration for A-Class and E-Class road profiles (ISO 2631-1 road roughness classification) and the 1?, 2? and 3? stress levels and deflection levels for each leaf spring are computed so as to assure the safety of design.