Simulation study of magnetorheological testing cell design by incorporating all basic operating modes

Magnetorheological (MR) fluid is one of the field-responsive fluids that is of interest to many researchers due to its high yield stress value, which depends on the magnetic field strength. Similar to electrorheological (ER) fluid, the combination of working modes is one of the techniques to increase the performance of the fluids with limited focus on MR fluids. In this paper, a novel MR testing cell incorporated with valve, shear and squeeze operational modes is designed and constructed in order to investigate the behaviour of MR fluid in combined mode. The magnetic field distribution in the design concept was analyzed using finite element method in order to verify the effective areas of each mode have the acceptable range of flux density. The annular gap of valve and shear were fixed at 1 mm, while the squeeze gap between the parallel circular surfaces was varied up to 20 mm. Three different coil configurations, which were made up from 23 SWG copper wires were set up in the MR cell. The simulation results indicated that the magnetic field distributed in the squeeze gap was the highest among the other gaps with all coils were subjected to a constant applied current of 1 A. Moreover, the magnetic flux densities in all gaps were in a good range of magnitude based on the simulations that validated the proposed design concept. Hence, the 3D model of the MR testing cell was designed using Solidworks for manufacturing processes.