Design and optimization of innovative magnetorheological damper with low temperature

Abstract

Magnetorheological (MR) damper is a controllable shock absorber that can be applied in semi-active suspension systems. Recently, many researchers have utilized this appliance in vast applications. However, there are only a few published works on analysis and performance enhancement of the MR fluids and dampers in terms of controlling their temperature. In this research, a novel MR damper with low temperature property was proposed in which a new wiring arrangement is utilized for the electromagnetic coil in order to achieve higher performance in comparison to conventional MR dampers. A finite element method was used to demonstrate the performance enhancement of the new MR damper using Ansoft Maxwell software. A dynamic test was carried out to realize the dynamic characteristics of the new MR damper and its temperature was experimentally obtained by using thermal camera FLIR i7. The experimental result showed that the amount of input current can be raised up to 9A. Furthermore, the MR damper can withstand high input current for a long time by using the cooling system. Another experimental study was performed to compare the thermal properties of the new and conventional MR dampers and numerically characterised the dynamic behaviour of the conventional MR damper by using adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The experimental result showed that after an hour, the new MR damper had a stable temperature of 35.3ºC while the conventional MR dampers reached more than 63ºC. ANFIS modelling result illustrated the distinct influence of input current, piston displacement and velocity on the damping force. A fuzzy-PID controller was applied in a quarter-car suspension system by using the constructed ANFIS model. The simulation result demonstrated the capability of fuzzy-PID controller in improving the performance of PID controller by 69.6%. An accurate model of the MR damper can enhance the performance of the control strategy.