A Rheological Model for Magneto-rheological Fluids

The article presents a rheological model for magnetorheological fluids (MRF) by blending a quasi-newtonian behavior at very low shear stress with a Herschel-Bulkley model for large shear stress value where the suspension displays a shear-thinning behavior. The model parameters allow the identification of a yield point on the flow curve, where the shear stress reaches a local maximum for large magnetic field intensity. It is shown that our model accurately fits the experimental data over a wide range of shear rate and coil electric current intensity values. A main advantage of our model is that it can be used in regular CFD codes to compute the MRF flow in practical applications. We present such a numerical example, and validate the numerical results against a quasi-analytical solution.