Steady rheological properties of a magnetorheological fluid from mining waste

Magnetorheological fluids have a viscosity which can be controlled by the application of magnetic field. Usually they have dispersions of magnetic particles with size micrometric in a carrier liquid. After purification process, extracted material from mining waste allowed us to obtain the magnetite that was used as the magnetic component of a magnetorheological fluid. The carrier continuous medium for such fluid was 2.5 and 20 W oils. These oils are used for damping systems in high-performance motorcycles and are readily available. The magnetics particle's size ranged from 2 to 100 mu m. Magnetic fields from 50 to 1200 gauss, as well as structural, morphological, and rheological studies were performed to the analyzed fluids. We observed that the model that best fits the stress vs. shear rate curves was the Herschel-Bulkley model.