Feasibility Study on the use of Nickel and Cobalt as Filler Materials in Smart Isotropic MR Elastomers

Abstract

Inspired and benefited by its controllable and field-dependent stiffness/damping properties, there has been an increasing research and development on magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) for mitigation of unwanted structural or machinery vibrations using MRE isolators or absorbers. The main aim of this research work was to determine the behaviour of MRE using Nickel and Cobalt and to compare the magnetorheological effect between them. Most of the research work have been done on MREs using carbonyl iron as filler material, so this study aimed at observing any change in characteristics of MREs using Nickel and Cobalt as filler particles. The use of nickel and cobalt has been increasing in magnetic appliances in every field and their magnetic properties at micro level are almost similar to carbonyl iron. So, the CI particles were replaced with Ni and Co particles. The research work methodology comprised of characterization of metallic powders to determine size of particles and check for impurities, then casting was done following it was the micro-image analysis of casted MREs and then the dynamic shear testing on the casted samples and finally the analysis of obtained results. The outcome of this research work was that for Nickel and Cobalt higher MR effect was observed at lower filler percentages and also higher MR effect was observed for Nickel based MREs than for Cobalt based MREs.