A new approach to magnetic circuit analysis and its application to the optimal design of a bi-directional magnetorheological brake

This paper proposes a new approach to modeling the magnetic circuit of an MR brake and applies it to explore an engineering optimization problem. The MR brake used in this work is a bi-directional type whose range of braking torque varies from negative to positive values. The model of the bi-directional MR brake can be split into two components: the mechanical part and the magnetic circuit. While the mechanical part is modeled using Bingham’s equation, an approach to modeling the magnetic circuit is proposed in this work. For verification of the effectiveness of this method, an optimal design aiming to minimize the mass subjected to the geometric and desired torque constraints is undertaken. In order to solve such an optimization problem, which consists of numerous constraints and potential local optima, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm in combination with a gradient-based repair method is proposed. The optimal solution of the problem obtained from the proposed method is then investigated and compared with that obtained from finite element analysis (FEA). In addition, an experiment on a manufactured bi-directional MR brake with the optimal parameters is undertaken to validate the accuracy of the proposed analysis methodology.