A New Rheological Model of Magnetorheological Fluids for CFD: Comparison and Validation

Magnetorheological fluid is a special smart fluid which can show different rheological properties under different magnetic flux densities due to its magnetically sensitive structure. This makes the fluid able to be manipulated and semi-actively controlled for various applications such as dampers, clutches and brakes. To provide an effective damping it is necessary to create an appropriate control algorithm. In order to design a structure with magnetorheological fluid and to get an idea for a control approach, the physics of the fluid motion has to be modelled. Computational Fluid Dynamics is an effective tool to model any fluid behaviour or any fluid involved structure. For magnetorheological devices, despite number of numerical models available in the literature, a befitting model is not yet presented. In this study a mapped rheological model is proposed and used in a magnetorheological damper simulation. The results are compared with other models and experimental data. It is shown that the new mapped model is effective and better than old approaches. It also showed a good agreement with the experimental data.