A control-oriented magnetorheological elastomer isolator for high-tech facilities: development and experimental verification

To protect high-tech facilities from micro-amplitude vibrations, a control-oriented magnetorheological (MR) elastomer (MRE) isolator (MRE-I) is developed. The MRE-I, which combines features of high bearing capacity and large MR effect, works in a stacked type compression and shear mixed mode. Meanwhile, index of high magnetic-energy ratio for MRE-I, with considering both the MR effect and power consumption is defined in this paper. Firstly, the magnetic field function of the MRE-I works in mixed mode is deduced. Taking high magnetic-energy ratio as the optimization objective, and using a genetic algorithm to solve the problem, the structure parameters are obtained. Subsequently, force to displacement tests with multi-operating conditions are conducted on the prototype, demonstrating an increase of 1604.29% in output force under a medium level of magnetic field. Lastly, vibration control tests using a fuzzy controller are carried out under an excitation of 1 m s⁻² in a frequency sweep condition ranging from 90 Hz to 135 Hz, reaching 40% reduction in root mean squared of acceleration response, demonstrating the feasibility of this MRE-I for time-varying, micro-amplitude and wide-band vibration control of high-tech facilities.