Material Selection for Automobile Torsion Bar Using Fuzzy Topsis Tool

Automotive components made from composite materials can result in significant weight savings over steel and aluminum. The main purpose of this article is to study about the selection of suitable composite material for automobile torsion bar which possess good strength to weight ratio and yield considerable weight savings. The conventional approaches to material selection problem tend to be less effective in dealing with the imprecise or vague nature of the linguistic assessment. Under many situations, the values of the qualitative criteria are often imprecisely defined for the decision-makers. To overcome this difficulty, fuzzy multi-criteria decisionmaking methods are proposed. In this paper, we present a multi-criteria decision making approach for selecting composite material under partial or incomplete information (uncertainty).The proposed approach involves identification of potential composite materials, selection of evaluation criteria, use of fuzzy theory to quantify criteria values under uncertainty and application of fuzzy TOPSIS to evaluate and select the best material for replacing conventional steel material used in making automobile torsion bar. The strength of the proposed work is the ability to deal with uncertainty arising due to a lack of real data in material selection for replacing the conventional material used in torsion bar. A numerical application is provided to illustrate the approach.