Polymer Spring for Heavy-Duty Load Application

In this article, a basic material recipe with uniform spring constant behavior is discussed, which comprises combinations of higher to lower modulus of elasticity with different carbon filler grades and dose variations as reinforcement (for normal to high spring behavior along with heavy-duty load bearing capacity), with good compressibility under heavy load conditions, which was validated by using various tools and techniques. Least square regression model is fitted with various hyperelastic models such as Mooney–Rivlin, Yeoh, Ogden and Neo-Hookean to extract material properties of rubber. In-house setup was designed and developed to extract biaxial stress–strain curve. Based on the materials composition behavior, suitable material has been selected, and finite element analysis of spring has been performed to get the stresses induced and compressibility of spring, force vs deflection curve was obtained and compared with similar characteristic of metallic spring for a given weight and size. From this experiment, the achieved compressibility in polymer spring was more than that of the metallic spring and observed spring vs deflection characteristics were like that of a metallic spring. Polymer spring can be a safe and unique substitution of metallic spring and can easily be used where the space and weight become a constraint, specifically for heavy-duty load application in many structural and dynamic applications.