Natural sisal fiber-based woven glass hybrid polymer composites for mono leaf spring: Experimental and numerical analysis

Abstract

Reducing weight and stabilizing or upgrading the strength is more important. Automotive and related industries are making a progress to replace the conventional steel leaf spring to composites material made from glass fibre, natural fibres, and so on. In this study, woven E-glass fibre, woven sisal and hybridization of woven glass and sisal fibre have been selected as materials. The resin used in this study is epoxy (B-11(3101)) VHV and the hardener is (K-6(5205)). The mono leaf spring is fabricated using hand lay-up process, which tends to be simple and cost effective. The existing dimensions of a conventional Tata Ace leaf spring are selected for modelling and analysis. Stress and deflection is tested experimentally by flexural testing. The hardness of the composites is determined with the help of Rockwell and Brinell hardness testing machine and the values are correlated with each other. Leaf spring is modeled in CREO Parametric 2.0 and introduced in ANSYS 14.5 for the numerical analysis. The results suggest that the composites have reduced weight up to 75% in comparison with the conventional one. With reduced component weight and better performance achieved by composite material, the replacement of conventional material with that of the composite is efficient. The efficiency of a vehicle will improve with a reduced component cost when composite leaf spring is used.