Experiments and Models of the Magneto Rheological Behavior of High Weight Percent Suspensions of Carbonyl Iron Particles in Silicone Oil

Flow properties of magnetorheological (MR) fluids are greatly altered by the application of a magnetic field. The design, optimization, and control of novel devices that exploit MR fluid behavior in multidegree of freedom applications require three dimensional models characterizing the coupling of magnetic behavior to mechanical behavior in MR fluids. The authors have derived 3D MR fluid models based on multiscale kinetic theory. The underlying bases of the models are summarized, with phenomenological empiricism distinguished from multiscale first principles, and the models’ ability to capture the experimentally measured mechanical response of a MR fluid-based damper to specified magnetic fields is assessed. The results of this comparison are that the kinetic theory-based models both relate macroscale MR fluid behavior to a first-principles description of magnetomechanical coupling at the microscale and possess the flexibility to best match the measured behavior of a particular MR fluid device observed in our experiments.