부산대학교 도서관

Modern advancements and emerging trends in automobile technology have shifted the primary focus of the OEMs to make vehicles lighter, faster, and reliable. Weight has always been a major concern in commercial medium/heavy-duty vehicles. The leaf springs account for 20% of the sprung weight of the vehicle thereby making the suspension system one of the heavy components of an automobile. This paper focuses on analysing the potential of aluminium alloy as a candidate material in leaf spring so as to make the suspension system lighter and more reliable. Aluminium alloy is one of the appropriate materials to proceed with because of its lightweight, strength, and non-significant deformation during load cycles. Three-dimensional CAD model of standard leaf spring was created in DS CATIA V5R19 software and computational analysis were carried out in ANSYS Workbench 18.1 by defining material as plain carbon steel (structural steel) and Aluminium alloy for comparative study. The results of the analysis that the reduction in weight of the leaf spring using aluminium alloy was approximately 64.71% along with a significant reduction in equivalent stress induced at different loading condition with a maximum reduction of 45.30% equivalent stress at the fully loaded dynamic condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]