Design analysis development and experimental testing of a magnetorheological damping device

Abstract

Vibration phenomenon is prevalent in almost all the engineering systems in one form or the other. In most of the situations, the vibration of the system and its components are detrimental to the fundamental objective of the system. Hence vibration control becomes quintessential for reducing the detrimental effects. Vibration control strategies are of three-fold namely passive control, active control and semi active control. Semi active control combines the advantages of both passive control and active control techniques with minimal cost and acceptable performance. There have been many semi active vibration control methods in vogue. The utilisation of magnetorheological effect has been identified as a potential option in this regard. Magnetorheological damper has been in vogue for the past few decades. This thesis aims at the formulation of a model for one such magnetorheological damper to be deployed for vibration control applications. The parameters involved in the design of the working domain of the magnetorheological damper were studied. Four geometrical parameters of the damper piston construction and two parameters of the electromagnetic coil were found to be the influencing parameters. A magnetostatic analysis was carried over by varying all the aforesaid parameters to find the yield stress value based on the concept of state transition in magnetorheology. The saturation level of the magnetic circuit of the damper piston was determined. The range of the dimensional values for the prototype damper were obtained from the literature review. newline