Leaf springs are machine elements that provide safety and driving comfort by storing the energy caused by the loads coming to the chassis and transport elements depending on the road conditions. Leaf springs are suspension elements commonly used particularly in heavy commercial vehicles. In this study, prototype leaf spring production was realized by forming the metal sheet and making heat treatments. Residual stress analysis, hardness, bending and strain gauge measurements were performed to examine the mechanical properties of the leaf spring produced. After the applied tempering process, the leaf spring microstructure was examined.

Leaf springs in vehicles are used to absorb, store and release energy. During this cycle stresses induced in the springs must not exceed design stress, in order to avoid settling or premature failure. Number of experiments are done in order to determine the stresses, load rate and deflection, which involves lot of time and cost. Today, the technologies in leaf springs are changing gradually; therefore new tools are required to keep aligned with worldwide technological requirements. The work presented in this paper provides a CAE solution to static analysis of 65Si7 leaf springs used in light commercial vehicles (LCV’s). A practical model of leaf spring used in LCV has been taken into consideration for this study. It has been experimentally tested for deflection, stress and load rate on a full scale leaf spring testing machine. A static structural CAE analysis of leaf spring has been done under similar loading condition. The CAD model of the leaf spring has been prepared in solid works and analyzed using ANSYS. Using CAE tools, ideal type of contact and meshing elements have been proposed to achieve results closer to the experimental results. The analytical method for static analysis of the leaf springs has also been described. CAE results have been compared with experimental and analytical results for validation.