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The job of a suspension system is to maximize the friction between the tires and the road surface, to provide steering stability with good handling and to act as a cushioning device to ensure the comfort of the driver and passengers. The suspension system also protects the vehicle and any cargo or luggage from damage and wear. Commonly the strength of these suspension systems is evaluated by endurance trials on field or Rig testing which are time consuming and costly. On the other hand, virtual testing methods for strength and stiffness evaluation provide useful information early in the design cycle and save significant time and cost. However, the virtual method also needs validation, which can be achieved by physical co-relations (via rig tests). A study has been done to predict the behavior of Leaf Spring Suspensions entirely through the FEA (Finite Element Analysis) route and correlating those results with physical test.

Leaf spring is a vital suspension component, such that the failure of leaf spring could cause fatal accidents. Due to frequent failures of leaf springs on vehicles, a method is developed to perform the numerical analysis using explicit solver which provides insightful analysis of leaf springs to prevent the occurrence of failure during engineering design. Since fatigue life assessment of leaf springs is a significant aspect during the design stage and due to the limitation of non-compatibility of output file of explicit solver for fatigue analysis, various studies are conducted and implicit solver is considered to perform FEA simulation of leaf spring. The present study delineates comparison of non-linear analysis of semi-elliptical leaf spring using explicit solver with that of implicit solver. Analysis using implicit solver gives us an advantage to export the model in fatigue life estimation solver which is not possible using explicit solver.

Most popular practice for analyzing the Subsystem failures in commercial vehicles is physical testing. These physical tests are carried out by three tests; Endurance testing, Accelerated Endurance Testing and Rig test simulation. All the three methods are costly and repetitive iterations of these tests is not economical. Therefore, in our organization, we established a method in virtual domain in order to reduce the repetitive iterations and also reduction in time consumed per iteration. General practice in our organization for Finite Element Analysis (FEA) calculation was inclusive of Model preparation, Transient analysis using Nastran. The results from the Transient analysis are used for performing fatigue analysis in fatigue software. In this process, Transient analysis and Model preparation are very much time consuming processes. Model preparation cannot be reduced, but to reduce the transient analysis time, we established a method in frequency domain (vibrational fatigue) [1].