Design of smart MR damper in shear-valve mode

Based on the excellent characteristics of smart material named Magnetorheological(MR) fluids, design techniques of MR damper in shear-valve mode were studied. Structures and principle of four typical operational modes of MR damper were analyzed. Some key technical details on structural design of MR damper such as the damping gap, length of piston, diameter of piston and piston rod were discussed exhaustively. Some points on magnetic circuit design of MR damper such as coil enwinding modes, magnetic core material and magnetic circuit calculation methods were investigated. To validate the design techniques, some experiments were done with a MR damper in shear-valve mode designed and fabricated by author. From the result, it concluded that damping force performance of the MR damper was very good and could be extended to the actual application for the semi-active vibration control engineering fields.