Design and Modeling of a Novel Double-Piston Magnetorheological Damper

Abstract

In order to develop a compact and lightweight controllable damper for space truss structures vibration suppression, a novel double-piston magnetorheological (MR) damper is proposed. Working principle of this damper has been analyzed. One prototype damper have been designed and fabricated according to the analysis results. A series of experiments have been performed to get this prototype damper's dynamical properties. Hyperbolic tangent model have been used to describe damper's nonlinear hysteresis. After model optimization using the nonlinear least squares method, the relationship between damper force and drive currents have been acquired under different excitation conditions. Comparison between the reconstructed results and testing data indicates that the optimized model shows enough accuracy to not only present the experimental data, but also forecast the hysteretic properties of this damper.