Experiment Investigation of Magnetorheological Damper for High Impulsive Load

In the past decade, magnetorheological (MR) damper, as a new type of smart damper, has gained significant findings which have led to good applications in the field of engineering. However, most of these work focused on low velocity and low frequency applications. This study provides an experimental investigation into a self-designed MR damper subject to high impulsive load. First of all, the active force of the recoil system in weapons is selected as an impulsive input of the MR damper. Then, a MR damper with long stroke of 440mm and single-ended construction especially for impact and high velocity is designed. The novel recoil apparatus is mainly composed of a MR damper and a series of springs. The measurement system includes transducers and the corresponding signal process equipments. Under the firing impulsive load, three currents including 1.0A, 1.5A and 2.0A are investigated. The results show that the peak force becomes larger when the current increases. On the other hand, the MR fluid is uncontrollable when velocity rises rapidly and it is not controllable until 0.026s.