Investigations Of The Preparation, Structure And Properties Of SEEPS Based Thermoplastic Magnetorheological Elastomers

As a new branch of magnetorheolgical smart materials, magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) are a kind of elastic polymer composites filled with micrometer-sized magnetic particles, overcoming the disadvantages of easy sedimentation, weak stability and sealed application of magnetorheological fluids. Magnetorheological elastomers exhibit rapidly and reversibly controllable mechanical properties and properties of magnetoelasticity and magnetoresistance in the presence of external magnetic field, which makes them possess wide application prospects in the fields shock absorption and smart sensors and attract great attentions of researcher.In this paper, magnetorheological materials are introduced firstly, including magnetorheological fluids (MRFs), magnetorheological foams and magnetorheological elastomers, and then the recent advance of the preparation and application of the magnetorheological elastomers is introduced emphatically. In this paper, to conquer the problems of low magnetorheological effect, high preparation cost, complex technique and unrecycling of present magnetorheological elastomers, excellent SEEPS thermoplastic elastomers were chosen to substitute conventional rubber as matrix to blend with magenetic carbonyl iron fillers to prepare novel isotropic and anisotropic SEEPS based magnetorheological elastomers with excellent elasticity, climateproof ability and high magnetorheological effect, by the use of convenient and rapid thermoplastic processing technique. Experimental results reveal that carbonyl iron are evenly dispersed in the SEEPS matrix, and the elongation at break of SEEPS based thermoplastic magnetorheological elastomers can still attain to 1000% even with such high filling of 80% carbonyl iron in the matrix. The intial storage modulus G0 and absolute storage modulus changeΔG of anisotropic magnetorheological elastomers are greater than those of isotropic magnetorheological elastomers, MR effect is depended on both of them.Titanate coupling agent was firstly introduced to modify the carbonyl iron particles in our research work, and effects of titanate coupling agent modification on the processibility, mechanical property, microstructure, thermal property, magnetorheological effect and magnetorheological behaviors of the SEEPS based thermoplastic magnetorheological elastomers were investigated in detail. After the titanate coupling agent modification, the magnetorheological effect of SEEPS based thermoplastic magnetorheological elastomers was successfully raised from 173% to 554%, and the processibility was improved and elongation at break and yield strain were increased too for these magnetorheological elastomers. We put forward a microstructural model to explain the mechanism for the influence of the titanate coupling agent modification on the structure and properties of the SEEPS based thermoplastic magnetorheological elastomers, and also verify the accuracy of this microstructural model.