An experimental study of a semiactive magneto-rheological fluid variable damper for vibration suppression of truss structures

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that vibrations of a truss structure can be suppressed nicely by a magneto-rheological (MR) fluid variable damper for semiactive vibration suppression. A variable MR fluid damper was designed and fabricated for this study. The principal characteristics of an MR damper were measured in dynamic tests, and a mathematical model of the damper was proposed. To investigate if the variable damper effectively suppresses the vibration of actual truss structures, semiactive vibration suppression experiments were performed using a cantilevered ten-bay truss beam. The experimental result has shown that the vibration was suppressed nicely by the variable MR damper, and that was compared with that of an electro-rheological (ER) damper investigated in previous research. The MR damper showed a higher performance than that of the ER damper.