A mathematical model of cavitation behaviour in a single-ended magnetorheological damper: experimental validation

This paper proposes a mathematical model of the cavitation behavior to occur in a single-ended magnetorheological (MR) damper (MRD), and the effectiveness of the model is validated through the comparison with experimental results. Several causes of the cavitation behavior of MRD are discussed with different conditions of the initial pressure of the gas chamber and the piston stroke speed. The model to capture the cavitation behavior is then formulated considering differential equations for gas volume, internal pressure, ideal gas law, and bulk modulus of MR fluid. To calculate the flow rate, which is difficult to solve from the differential equations, the model is approximated as a nondimensional equation the parameters of the yield stress and pole length. Subsequently, the field-dependent damping force of MRD is computed using the gaseous cavitation model and nondimensional equation. To validate the proposed cavitation model, a single-ended MRD is designed, manufactured, and tested. It is observed that the damping force characteristics under cavitation are revealed to be much different from those under regular operation without cavitation. More specifically, it is hard to calculate the dissipation energy and hysteretic damping due to highly nonlinear characteristics with respect to the stroke and velocity. However, the proposed model can fairly capture the cavitation behavior showing an excellent agreement between simulation and experiment. In this work, to confirm the internal influence of MRD by cavitation, which is difficult to confirm experimentally, the changes of the pressure distribution and the gas-to-liquid volume ratio are analyzed through the simulation of the nondimensional equation. In addition, the bubbles representing the cavitation behavior are visually observed from the lower chamber of MRD.