Optimal Design And Performance Investigation Of Metal Foam MRF Damper

Magnetorheological fluid (MRF) is a kind of smart materials, in the action of external magnetic field, it can transform from Newtonian fluid to semi-solid or solid with viscoplasticity in milliseconds, and the transform is reversible. The phenomenon above is called MR effect. MRF dampers, as a kind of the semi-active and controllable dampers, have been focused for the academia and engineering region because of their variable damping feature, mechanical simplicity, low power consumption, fast response and have been widely used in civil engineering and transportation and so on, since the MR effect was discovered.The study is mainly to make optimal design of the metal foam MRF damper and investigate its performance. Firstly, the damping performance of a metal foam MRF damper is analyzed theoretically and investigated experimentally, and magnetic field simulation is made through the finite element analysis software ANSYS to analyze the distribution of magnetic field and shear performance,then the comparison is made between simulation and experiment. Then, on the basis of analyzing the performance and the effects of structure parameters on the shear performance, in order to achieve the optimum performance, the optimal design in magnetic circuit parameters is conducted according to the theory of optimization. The metal foam MRF damper with excellent performance is designed and manufactured in the light of the results of optimization. Finally, a test rig is built to test the performance of the processed damper. Compared to the damper before optimization, performance of the damper after optimization improves 1.46 times. For the damper after optimization, there will be certain application prospect, and the method on the process of optimization can also provide a guidance for the study of MR damper in the future.