PERFORMANCE COMPARISON AND STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION OF LEAF SPRINGS OF DIFFERENT COMPOSITES

Abstract

Abstract: With the increasing competition in the automotive industry and the growing demands of environmental protection, it is necessary to optimize and reduce the weight of vehicle components design. In this paper, the geometry model of the leaf spring of a typical vehicle was established using CATIA 3D. Then it was imported into ANSYS 15.0 for construction of the finite element model (FEM). Five different material properties were defined in the FE model including steel and four types of fiber reinforced composites (E-glass/epoxy, S-glass/epoxy, Carbon/epoxy and Kevlar/epoxy). The stress, deformation, stiffness and weight of the leaf spring were obtained from FEM and then were compared to each other for the double-leaf steel spring, double-leaf composite springs (of four composite properties) and mono-leaf composite spring (of four composite properties). The results show that the mono E-glass/epoxy composite leaf spring has the best performance price ratio, and the weight is reduced by 80% compared to the traditional steel leaf spring. In regard to the fact that there is section in leaf spring with very low stress under vehicle loading, the structural optimization was conducted to develop a mono E-glass/epoxy composite leaf spring with varied section width. The component weight, the safety factor, natural frequency and strain energy of the mono E-glass/epoxy composite leaf spring before and after the optimization were compared, and the results show that the mono E-glass/epoxy composite leaf spring with variable width after the optimization has satisfactory performance, with low cost and further 5% weight reduction.

Key words: FRP composite, leaf spring, structural optimization, finite element analysis

CLC Number:

TB332

CHEN Guang-hao, LIANG Zhi-hong, ZHANG Zhi-fang. PERFORMANCE COMPARISON AND STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION OF LEAF SPRINGS OF DIFFERENT COMPOSITES[J]. Composites Science and Engineering, 2020, 0(6): 35-45.

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