Paper Title
Design and Analysis of Leaf Spring for Solar Vehicle

Abstract
Leaf springs are widely used as automotive suspension to absorb shock loads. Suspension system in an automobile determines the riding comfort of passengers and the amount of damage to the vehicle. The main function of leaf spring assembly as suspension element is not only to support vertical load, but also to isolate road-induced vibrations. This paper is the work performed towards the optimization of the leaf spring for solar vehicle with constraints of maximum bending stress, von-Mises stress, deflection and natural frequency of leaf spring under safety load condition. Chromium steel AISI 5150 is used for front and rear leaf spring material. In this paper, front and rear leaf spring are analysed by changing various thickness. The thickness and width of the front leaf springs for optimum design are 8 mm and 50 mm. Thickness and width of the rear leaf spring design are 5 mm and 45 mm. The von-Mises stress of front leaf spring is 755.44 MN/m2 and rear leaf spring is 662.50 MN/m2. Working frequency of front and rear leaf spring are 1.466 Hz and 1.815 Hz respectively. Working frequency do not match with natural frequencies of the front and rear leaf spring at six mode shapes. Therefore, the designed leaf spring is safe for modal analysis. SolidWorks software is used for modelling of leaf spring designs and ANSYS software is used for structural and modal analysis of leaf springs. Keywords- Automobile, Bending stress, Deflection, Leaf spring, Modal analysis, Structural analysis.