Leaf springs have a long history of use in wheeled vehicles. In automobiles, buses, and trucks semi-elliptical leaf springs are most often employed to both locate and spring a solid axle making them an economical choice.

Leaf springs used in automobiles, trucks, and buses are typically semi-elliptical in form and built up of a stack of leaves, with each subsequent leaf of shorter length than the previous. The longest leaf in the spring which has the spring eyes is the master leaf. The other leaves are graduated leaves. The maximum distance measured perpendicular from the line passing through the spring eye centres to the surface of the master leaf is the spring camber. The camber is created so when the spring load deflects to the vehicle’s design position the spring reacts the design load.

Leaf Spring Builder

The Leaf Spring Builder is used to model leaf spring using rigid bodies, beams, and contact forces. You can enter information about the number of leaves, the leaf shapes, cross-sections, material properties, and contact properties, the shackle length if your spring employs a shackle, the nominal axle load and other information to create a MDL system definition, which you can import into a suspension or full vehicle model.

The Leaf Spring Builder saves the data you have entered to build a model and it can be imported in a leaf spring property file format. If you need to modify the leaf shapes, section properties, material properties or other components of a leaf spring model, open the leaf property file in the leaf spring builder, make your modification, and then build a new leaf spring system definition.