Abstract—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. In this paper reducing weight of vehicles and increasing or maintaining the strength of their spare parts is considered. As leaf spring contributes considerable amount of weight to the vehicle and needs to be strong enough, a single E-glass/Epoxy leaf spring is designed following the design rules of the composite materials considering static loading only. The constant cross section design of leaf springs is employed to take advantages of ease of design analysis and its manufacturing process. And it is shown that the resulting design stresses are much below the strength properties of the material, satisfying the maximum stress failure criterion. The designed composite leaf spring has also achieved its acceptable fatigue life. This particular design is made specifically for light weight vehicles.

Index Terms—Steel spring, E-glass/Epoxy, Static load

Cite: Achamyeleh A Kassie, R Reji Kumar, and Amrut Rao, "Design of Single Composite Leaf Spring for Light Weight Vehicle," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 191-197, January 2014.