Design of Magnetorheological Fluid Damper with Optimal Damping Force

Abstract

This article focuses on designing and analyzing of an optimal Magnetorheological Fluid Damper (MRFD) having varying piston shape channeled into the piston of the MRFD. A finite element approach has been employed to investigate the impact of piston material, piston shape, MR fluid gap and pole length on the generated magnetic field density, yield stress along with damping force. Taguchi L18 orthogonal array has been exercised to obtain the optimal damping force. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) results investigate the contribution of the selected parameters and depict that the MR fluid gap is the most predominant factor which affects the damping force, making a contribution of 77.56%, followed by piston material which contributes 12.40%, pole length with a contribution of 8.23% and piston shape has negligible contribution of 0.07%. Taguchi predicts the optimized model for the selected parameters as A2B2C1D3 which has been validated by carrying out the analysis using ANSYS Maxwell software v. 16. The damping force of 1053 N has been obtained for the optimal MR damper model which is based on the prediction of the Taguchi results.