Vibration control of mechanical systems using semi-active MR-damper

The concept of structural vibration control is to absorb vibration energy of the structure by introducing auxiliary devices. Various types of structural vibration control theories and devices have been recently developed and introduced into mechanical systems. One of such devices is damper employing controllable fluids such as ElectroRheological (ER) or MagnetoRheological (MR) fluids. MagnetoRheological (MR) materials are suspensions of fine magnetizable ferromagnetic particles in a non-magnetic medium exhibiting controllable theological behaviour in the presence of an applied magnetic field. This paper presents the modelling of an MR-fluid damper. The damper model is developed based on Newtonian shear flow and Bingham plastic shear flow models. The geometric parameters are varied to get the optimised damper characteristics. The numerical analysis is carried out to estimate the damping coefficient and damping force. The analytical results are compared with the experimental results. The results confirm that MR damper is one of the most promising new semi-active devices for structural vibration control.