A Concentric Design of a Bypass Magnetorheological Fluid Damper with a Serpentine Flux Valve

This work presents a new concentric design structure of a bypass magnetorheological (MR) damper with a serpentine flux valve type. In this design, the serpentine valve is installed not in the middle of the piston but on the bypass channel of the damper. However, to make it less bulky, the location of the valve installation is chosen to be in line with the cylinder axis, which is different from the common configuration of the bypass damper. With the proposed design concept, the performance flexibility of the bypass configuration and the compactness of the piston valve configuration can be accomplished. In this study, these benefits were demonstrated by firstly deriving an analytical model of the proposed MR damper focusing on the bypass concentric valve structure, which is vital in determining the damping force characteristics. The prototype of MR damper was also fabricated and characterized using the dynamic test machine. The simulation results show that the damping force could be adjusted from 20 N in the off-state to around 600 N in the on-state with 0.3 A of excitation current. In the experiments, during low piston velocity measurement, the on-state results from the simulation were generally in good agreement with the experimental results. However, with the increase in piston velocity, the deviation between the simulation and the experiment gets higher. The deviations are most probably due to seal frictions that were not accounted for in the model. The seal friction is probably dominant as the seals in the prototype need to be prepared for handling higher fluid pressure. As a result, the frictions are quite prevalent and significantly affect the measured off-state damping forces as well, where it was recorded ten times higher than the predicted values from the model. Nevertheless, although there were deviations, the dynamic range of the concentric bypass structure is still 1.5 times higher than the conventional structure and the new structure can be potentially explored more to achieve an improved MR damper design.