Tunable Young’s Moduli of Soft Composites Fabricated from Magnetorheological Materials Containing Microsized Iron Particles

Abstract

This study experimentally investigates the field-dependent Young’s moduli of soft composites, which are fabricated from two different magnetic-responsive materials; magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) and magnetorheological fluid (MRF). Four factors are selected as the main factors affecting Young’s modulus of soft composites: the amount of MRF, the channel pattern, shore hardness and carbonyl iron particle (CIP) concentration of the MRE layer. Five specimens are manufactured to meet the investigation of four factors. Prior to testing, the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image is taken to check the uniform dispersion of the carbonyl iron particle (CIP) concentration of the MRE layer, and a magnetic circuit is constructed to generate the effective magnetic field to the specimen fixed at the universal tensile test machine. The force–displacement curve is directly measured from the machine and converted to the stress–strain relationship. Thereafter, the Young’s modulus is determined from this curve by performing linear regression analysis with respect to the considered factors. The tunability of the Young’s moduli of the specimens is calculated based on the experimental results in terms of two performance indicators: the relative percentage difference of Young's modulus according to the magnetic field, and the normalized index independent of the zero-field modulus. In the case of the relative percentage difference, the specimens without MRF are the smallest, and the ones with the highest CIP concentration are the largest. As a result of comparing the normalized index of each factor, the change in shore hardness and channel pattern have little effect on the tunability of Young’s moduli, and the amount of MRF injected and CIP concentration of MRE have a large effect. The results of this study are expected to provide basic guidelines for fabricating soft composites whose field-dependent Young’s moduli can be tuned by several factors with different effects.

A Review on Structural Configurations of Magnetorheological Fluid Based Devices Reported in 2018–2020

“…Magnetorheological fluid (MRF), as a kind of smart materials, has been widely studied by scholars due to its controllable rheological properties in a few milliseconds (Jackson et al, 2018;Fu et al, 2020;Zheng et al, 2020). In the technical fields of vibration isolation (Rossi et al, 2018;Phu and Choi, 2019), energy absorption (Ahamed et al, 2016;Yoon J.-Y. et al, 2020), and actuation control (Hong et al, 2019; et al, MRF has a unique advantage as the main part of the manipulation or regulation mechanism.…”

Magnetorheological fluids: A concise review of composition, physicochemical properties, and models

“…According to unusual properties, Magnetorheological Fluids are widely applied in different branches of industry (Ahamed et al, 2018), in particular in many commercial devices, especially operating on the LORD Corporation’s MR fluids (Ashtiani and Hashemabadi, 2015; Dyniewicz et al, 2014; Kciuk and Turczyn, 2006; Mangal and Kumar, 2015). Most of the applications are based on mechanical devices like clutches (Johnston et al, 1998; Olszak et al, 2019), seals (Zhou et al, 2020), shock absorbers, (Deng et al, 2019; Yoon et al, 2020; Zhong et al, 2020), vibration dampers (Carlson and Charzan, 1994; Wang et al, 2018; Wei et al, 2020; Yuan et al, 2019), valves (Hu et al, 2019), brakes (Wu et al, 2018; Zhu and Geng, 2018), or even seismic vibration dampers (Caterino et al, 2022; Christie et al, 2019; Gordaninejad et al, 2002; Jung et al, 2003; Li et al, 2007; Liu et al, 2001, 2005; Zareie et al, 2022) to reduce different vibrations. They offer quiet, rapid-response, and simple interfaces between the mechanical and electronic systems used for mechanical energy dissipation.…”

A new tunable elastic metamaterial structure for manipulating band gaps/wave propagation

“…Many mechanisms, such as circuit control [26] , magneto fluid [27][28] , and structural deformation [29] , are introduced to realize adjusting resonance frequency of local resonators, which results in tunable band gaps when subjected to different external environments. Zhang et al [30] experimentally demonstrated handedness switching in metamaterials in response to external optical stimuli.…”