Modeling magnetorheological dampers with application of nonparametric approach

This article studies the application of nonparametric modeling approach to model magnetorheological (MR) dampers. For comparison purposes, another typical parametric modeling method for electrorheological (ER) and MR dampers is reviewed. The existing parametric MR damper model includes a stiff Bouc-Wen model that is not friendly for simulation study and real time implementation of model-based advanced control algorithms. In order to avoid the difficulties by using the existing parametric model, the test data from a commercialized MR damper is employed to develop nonparametric models, which can consist of a series of numerically efficient mathematic functions. In addition, the selected functions are required to be continuous and differentiable for potential model-based control algorithms. The results of the nonparametric models show that such different models are comparable. Furthermore, one nonparametric model is selected to be compared with a parametric model and the test data to illustrate the accuracy of the model. The comparison shows that the proposed nonparametric models are able to accurately predict the damper force characteristics, damper bilinear behavior, hysteresis, and electromagnetic saturation. It is further shown that the nonparametric models can be numerically solved with an integration step size of the order of 10(-2) s, much faster than the parametric models of the order of 10(-5) s, which clearly shows that the proposed nonparametric models are feasible even for real time model-based control algorithms.