Magnetic circuit design for magneto-rheological damper

Magneto-rheological (MR) damper is a smart damping device that can vary its damp with the change of magnetic field. Because of MR damper's exceptional characteristic, it has been widely used in many engineering fields, such as vehicle semi-active suspension control, seismic response reduction, weapon system, and so on. It is no doubt that the key to MR damper is magnetic circuit design. In this paper, a magnetic circuit design for a new structure MR damper (also named as parallel-disks MR damper) is proposed, and the selection of materials, the calculation of coil turns and coil current is discussed. Finally, the design is analyzed with finite element method, and its effectiveness is verified.