Leaf Spring of a Lightweight Commercial Vehicle Suspension System: Structural Analysis

Abstract

Mathematical and computer modeling have been playing an increasingly important role in the computer aided engineering (CAE) process of many products since last 60 years. The present work consists of a leaf spring involving two supporting leafs with the main Leaf. Main leaf and the centre leaf are having a uniform cross section throughout the length of the blade, while the bottom leaf having a thickness of around 1.5 times of that of the other two. Moreover a central bolt and two supporting U-Bolts are provided to hold leafs together. The load is applied axially downwards at the eye ends of the main leaf and a double magnitude load is applied at the bottom of the bolt. Here in the present model we have taken the steel material for the analysis purpose and the nut is firmly fixed by giving a fully constrained boundary condition on it. An octree 10 node modified tetrahedron mesh element is used for the discretization of the spring model. For the whole work i.e., from the modeling to the result generation CATIA V5R12 software is used and the obtained results are finally compared with the numerically obtained result of stress and deflection to validate the simulation results. Vehicle whose, leaf spring dimension are taken is light commercial vehicle (Ashok Leland Dost).