In today competitive world, gaining customer delight is the most vital part of an automotive business. Customers’ expectations are high which need to be satisfied limitless, to stay in the business. The major expectation of a commercial vehicle customer is a vehicle without failures which involves lower spares cost and downtime.
The significance of a suspension system in the new age automobiles is getting advanced. There have been many improvements in the suspension system especially in leaf springs to provide a better ride comfort, and one such modern era implementation is the Parabolic Spring which comprises of fewer leaves with varying thickness from the center to the ends without inter-leaf friction. Study reveals that parabolic spring exhibits better ride comfort, but less life compared to a conventional leaf spring which leads to the increase in downtime of the vehicle. This paper focuses on studying life improvement of parabolic spring thereby increasing the up-time of the passenger buses.
This paper discusses about how other suspension components & parameters affect the life of a parabolic spring and recommends optimized solutions based on various experiments conducted in few passenger vehicles with real road condition using a Four poster Road Simulator to improve the spring life. The results of the experiments are encouraging and show commendable increase in spring life which also gains customer delight.