Evaluation of characteristics of Magnetorheological rotary damper through experimentation

Evaluation of damping characteristics of rotary damper is essential to implement it in any practical applications like robot manipulators, automobiles etc. The regular rotary dampers have fixed damping torque characteristics hence their usage and performance are limited. In the present paper, a variable rotary damper has been developed and characterized through experimentation. The damping torque/speed variations concerning different magnetic fields are parameters to be evaluated in the experimentation. This variable nature is achieved by employing the magnetorheological fluid as the damping medium. When this fluid is subjected to a magnetic field the viscosity of the fluid tends to increase thereby changing the torque of the damper. In this experiment, the magnetic field is applied with the help of permanent magnets. A different field strength has been achieved by varying the distance between the magnet and MR fluid. The testing has been conducted for distances of 3, 6, 9,12 and 15 mm and its effect on the rotational speeds is captured in each set of experiments. Upon reviewing the results of the experiments, it has been found that the speed of the rotary damper has significantly reduced with maximum magnetic field