An Improved Model for Magnetorheological Fluid-Based Actuators and Sensors:

The resistance to flow of magnetorheological (MR) fluids is greatly increased by the application of a magnetic field. At present, most devices exploiting this MR fluid behavior are pistons executing straight-line motion. The MR fluids in these devices are subjected to shear flow, and are modeled by either the Bingham plastic or Herschel-Buckley models, both 1D, phenomenological continuum-level forms relating strain rate, magnetic field magnitude, and stress magnitude, and fit to continuum-level empirical measurements. We employ a multiscale model of the MR fluid introduced in an earlier paper, which integrates nanoscale behavior over a mesoscale volume to deduce continuum properties. This approach replaces many of the phenomenological features of the Bingham plastic and Herschel-Buckley models with first principles, and isolates those few phenomenological features that remain into a single scalar term. The model is compared to the Bingham plastic and Herschel-Buckley models, assessing each model’s ability...