A mechanical engineer weighs in on Corvette leaf springs

I'm still freaked out over their design choice. I know they work, like the old vacuum tubes we see in some audio gear, but still, I'm freaked out by the use. 

In reply to Coupefan :

You know, maybe the vacuum tube analogy is a good one. (Says the guy sitting beside two tube amps.)

I wonder if you could go old school and stack leafs to change the rates?

In reply to Appleseed :

You could conceivably make multileaf packs, but then you end up with all of the downsides of a multileaf pack.

Coupefan said:

I'm still freaked out over their design choice. I know they work, like the old vacuum tubes we see in some audio gear, but still, I'm freaked out by the use. 

There are a lot of dynamic as well as packaging benefits to their use.

Hey - as I type this I am sitting in front of a tube power amp fed by a tube preamp. Nothing wrong with tubes (or valves as the British call them), and certain military gear has long used tubes because they are much less problematic in an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from a nuclear explosion.  The fact that Russian planes used tubes extensively for that purpose accounts for the continued popularity of Russian made (usually Sovtec) tubes in hi-fi.

(I also have a couple of systems that use 120 lb Class A mono solid state amps, so I go both ways). The irony is that my tube power amp puts out 70 W while my Class A amps put out 45 W (but they do it right down to 1 ohm).

BTW - very interesting spring article - thanks.

This is verrrrry interesting to me, but so far only talks about the spring rate in ride.  Whatb happens in roll as the weight transfers into and thru the corner is what I'm most fascinated by, and this article is only a teaser of that.  Argh!  I'll be panting for the next one.  I have never been a fan of the C7 chassis, and I suspect these variable wheel rates under load may be the reason why the car feels unpredictable to me.  I am also curious about the choice of the transverse leaf in the first place, given its foibles.

A GM engineer I met while testing press cars for a magazine told me (as I recall...) that in roll, the unloaded side of the transverse leaf is still affecting the loaded side, and that the wheel rate varies with travel.  It is not linear.  I believe I feel this when driving the C7 hard.

Thank you GRM staff and Lane Borg, great stuff and cant wait for the spring rates in roll story!

i would think like on a live axle you would get energy transfer from one wheel to the other when a wheel hits a bump, being the spring is directly connected to each other. there would also be a fair amount of deflection on the mounts to the chassis because they are not directly acting on the chassis but are cantilevered away from the wheel area, so the forces loaded into the chassis is far higher than a coil sprung car. 

often wondered if composite springs are any different to leaf springs, being you can tailor fiber orientation compared to steel leafs. 

Just in general lief springs are not linear at all plus they have inherit friction between the leaves of the springs (steel leafs springs) .They are very inefficient as far as energy stored /lb 

the non linear spring rate isn't really bad as long as you have that engineered into the system. 

For all those commenting on a roll or single sided bump scenario transferring forces to the other side: have you forgotten about sway bars? Because they do the exact same thing.

As stated before I was always tought the transverse leaf also acts like a sway bar. Isn't conventional knowledge that you could run less spring rate and more bar? Could that be why the coil guys are having to run so much more rate, because they lose roll stiffness moving to a coil?

I think he's onto something with the mounting, when you take a leaf out and see how mangled and beat up the mounts and pads are its obvious those thing deflect a bunch.