Performance prediction of magnetorheological valves under various type of fluid and flux path

Abstract

Magnetorheological (MR) valve is one of the key components in regulating the control flow of MR fluid flow in MR devices. Due to MR rheological properties enabling magnetic modifications, many MR valve designs have been introduced and are widely utilized in MR devices. The main objective of this article is to compare the pressure drop generated by each types of MR valves. Five different configurations of MR valves were analyzed in this study. To provide a fair comparison, several parameters were fixed; which is the size of the MR valves, gap size, number of coil turns and power consumption. In order to demonstrate the MR valve performance, the pressure drops were calculated based on the mathematical equations derived from MR valve models and the magnetic fields derived from finite element method based software. The results of the simulations were compared to each type of MR valve and, then, discussed.