Experimental and Numerical Studies of Magnetorheological (MR) Damper

The design of a MR damper, consisting of piston and cylinder arrangement, is presented in this paper. In this paper, a 2D axisymmetric model based on finite element method (FEM) concept has been developed on the ANSYS platform to analyze and examine the MR damper characteristics. Based on the FEM model, a prototype of the MR damper is fabricated and tested experimentally in the semi active vibration laboratory of the department. The comparison of both these model analyses indicates that the FEM based model is effectively portraying the experimental behavior of the MR damper in terms of its damping force. The results obtained in this paper will be helpful for the designers to create more efficient and reliable MR dampers and also to predict its damping force characteristics.