The effect of magnetic field on surface roughness of magnetorheological elastomers: a theoretical simulation

We perform a theoretical simulation to investigate how the magnetic field induces the interaction of ferromagnetic particles inside MRE, and consequently how the surface microstructures of MRE are changed. Firstly, we propose a mesoscopic model of the MRE by assuming that particles have the same radius, and they are randomly distributed in the matrix. Both particles and matrix are considered as linear elastic materials. We apply Monte-Carlo method to produce the initial surface microstructure of the MRE before considering the magnetic field effect. Further, we use sequential decoupling FEM method to solve the magneto-mechanical coupling problem. The relationships of surface roughness of MREs with the volume fraction of ferromagnetic particles, the magnetic field strength, the initial surface microstructure, and the matrix modulus have been numerically investigated.