Effect of modified bouc-wen model parameters on the dynamic hysteresis of magnetorheological dampers

Abstract Magnetorheological (MR) dampers are a semi active control device that becoming a promising actuators in vibration mitigation. The unique properties of MR fluids are used to control the damping force without consuming large power source. Despite MR dampers are fail-safe, efficient, and robustness devices, they poses significant nonlinear characteristics. A well-known Bouc-Wen models and their extension modified Bouc-Wen are the most accurate models that predict the hysteresis of the MR dampers. However, these models suffer from some complexity and limitations and they miss a good fitting to the measured data. In this paper, the existing modified Bouc-Wen (MBW) models are introduced and their dynamic characteristics are simulated using MATLAB Simulink environment. The robustness of the model is judged by a comparison between the experimental tests of the MR damper (on and off state) on the MTS damper test machine in MTC and the simulated characteristics. To better understand the damper nonlinearity, an investigation into the effect of the model parameters on the dynamic characteristics of the damper is studied. A parametric study is proposed to identify the optimal model parameters that best fits the experimental data. The response of the model with the obtained parameters is validated across the measured MR damper characteristics under different sinusoidal excitations and command current. The results show a good agreement between the simulated and measured responses of the MR damper.