Semi-Active Isolators Using Electrorheological/Magnetorheological Fluids
ER (electrorheological)/MR (magnetorheological) fluids are colloidal suspensions that can control their rheological properties such as viscosity and yield stress in response to external signal. As a result, applications using ER/MR fluids have useful features such as fast response time and continuous control ability. These kinds of inherent advantages of ER/MR fluids trigger a lot of research activities on ER/MR applications including controllable vibration isolation systems, torque-transmission devices, and others. Among them, semi-active ER/MR fluid-based vibration isolators will be studied in this paper. The semi-active isolators can effectively isolate systems from various external disturbances with low power consumption, so that the system should not expose to significant dynamic stress and fatigue damage.