SENSITIVITY OF MAGNETORHEOLOGICAL DAMPER BEHAVIOR TO PERTURBATIONS IN TEMPERATURE VIA BOUC - WEN MODEL

In this study, the temperature dependent dynamic behavior of a magnetorheological (MR) damper was characterized. To this end, an MR damper, which was designed and fabricated for a ground vehicle seat suspension application, was tested over temperatures ranging from 0 degrees C to 100 degrees C at a constant frequency of 4 Hz and a constant amplitude of 7.62 mm on an MTS-810 material testing system equipped with a temperature-controlled environmental chamber. And, the widely adopted Bouc-Wen model was assessed to characterize the temperature dependency of the MR damper through examining the trends of the model parameters. It was observed that although mBW model could capture the MR damper behavior well, some of the model parameters did not represent the physical realization of the damper based on the physical structure of the model. This is attributed to the fact that mBW has differential terms and thus, an infinite solution space and different combinations of the model parameters may yield similar results. Therefore, it was concluded that mBW model was not successful to model the temperature dependency of MR damper behavior.