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Suspension systems
Published in M.J. Nunney, Light and Heavy Vehicle Technology, 2007
Following the invention of the leaf spring in full elliptic form as long ago as 1804 by Obediah Elliot, the use of leaf springs first on horse-drawn and later on railway rolling stock considerably predates the era of the motor vehicle. Perhaps not surprisingly, the designers of early motor vehicles soon realized that the great practical advantage of this type of spring is that its capacity can easily be changed by varying the number of leaves, and any degree of resilience can be obtained by varying the thickness and width of the leaves. It is therefore interesting to find that leaf springs continue to be used extensively in both the front and rear suspension systems of commercial vehicles and some 4 × 4 vehicles, but they are now rarely used in the suspension systems of passenger cars.
Computational study on the potential of aluminium alloy as a candidate material in automotive leaf spring
Published in Australian Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2023
Mayank Kamboj, Amit Chetry, Caneon Kurien, Ajay Kumar Srivastava
Leaf spring has the highest potential to hold large sprung weight and provide comfort as well. Leaf spring is mainly designed to absorb a large amount of strain energy and undergo less deformation during loading cycles (Nikam and Teli 2018). Heavy-duty vehicles carry tones of load and have to travel in different terrains, so the leaf spring or the flat springs should have the strength to carry brake torque, driving torque, shocks, and lateral loads. The master leaves carry 50% more loads than the graduated leaves. To make the uniform distribution of loads the full-length leaves are given less thickness than the graduated leaves and also the radius of curvature of master leaves is increased than the graduated leaves for maintaining optimum nipping distance (Mohamed and Madhavan 2020).
Performance of leaf spring suspended axles in model approaches of different complexities
Published in Vehicle System Dynamics, 2022
Georg Rill, Florian Bauer, Edin Topcagic
Leaf spring suspended axles are still very popular in commercial vehicles, in particular in the front axles of heavy trucks and for off-road applications. Leaf springs suspend and guide the axles at the same time which makes it difficult to incorporate these elements within common multibody vehicle models.