Design and analysis of a self-powered, self-sensing magnetorheological damper

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed and investigated a self-powered, self-sensing magnetorheological (MR) damper, which integrates energy harvesting, sensing and MR damping capabilities into one device. This multifunctional integration would bring great benefits such as energy saving, high reliability, size and weight reduction, lower cost, and less maintenance for the use of MR damper systems. A prototype of the self-powered, self-sensing MR damper was designed, fabricated and tested. The power generator hardware could serve as the power generation and velocity sensing simultaneously. Analyses on the generated electrical voltages and power were performed and validated experimentally. A combined magnetic-field isolation method was developed and analyzed. A novel velocity-sensing method was proposed and experimentally validated to extract the velocity information from the signals of the power generator. This method requires real-time signal processing while extra mechanical mechanism is not needed. The damping force characteristic of the separate MR damper was also investigated.