A novel phenomenological model for predicting the nonlinear hysteresis response of magnetorheological gel

Magnetorheological (MR) gel is a new branch of MR materials, which can overcome the disadvantages attaching to MR fluid such as sedimentation. To fulfill the semi-active control of the MR gel in the mechanical application, a highly effective model needs to be proposed to predict the nonlinear hysteresis behavior of MR gel accurately. In this paper, a new phenomenological model is constructed according to the hysteresis responses of the MR gel. The current is employed as an input variable under different frequencies, i.e., 0.1 Hz, 5 Hz and 15 Hz. The model parameters have been identified using the genetic algorithm and the modeling results are compared with two classical models such as Bouc-Wen model and Dahl model. The root means square error (RMSE) is employed as an evaluation criterion and the results show that the proposed phenomenological model can forecast the hysteresis with high accuracy and especially has the capability to capture the strain softening/stiffening characteristics of the MR gel. Therefore, the constructed model is a great candidate to implement the semi-active control of the MR gel in the practical application with various excitations. (c) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).