A novel flexural damping channel magnetorheological damper with high effective magnetic field coverage and experimental verification of damping performance

Abstract Conventional magnetorheological dampers (MRDs) have limitations owing to their low effective magnetic field coverage, and improving MRD structures is a common approach to address this issue. However, many existing MRD designs have limitations such as large radial dimensions and high coil power consumption. Therefore, this paper transformed the conventional damping channel into the flexural damping channel to increase the effective magnetic field coverage of the MRD based on the conventionalstructure. And then, the pressure drop model was utilized to preliminarily determine the structural parameters of the new MRD. Subsequently, a multi-physics coupling finite element method (FEM) analysis model was constructed to accurately determine the structural parameters, ensuring that the novel flexural damping channel (NFDC) MRD increases the output peak damping force while reducing the radial dimension and input power. Furthermore, the damping force variable range is stabilized when the excitation current is zero (field-off). Finally, a large number of vibration tests were conducted on both the conventional and NFDC MRDs, and it was found that the NFDC MRD has better vibration energy dissipation capacity and higher output peak damping force while maintaining a basically same field-off damping force variable range compared with the conventional MRD. The above process not only proved that the NFDC MRD possesses excellent output damping capability and working condition adaptability, but also validated the operational effectiveness of employing the multi-physics coupling analysis method to design the NFDC MRD.