The effect of magnetorheological fluid and aerodynamic damping on the flutter boundaries of MR fluid sandwich plates in supersonic airflow

Abstract

The present study deals with aeroelastic stability analysis of sandwich plates, containing magnetorheological fluid as the core layer, subjected to the supersonic airflow. The classical plate theory, Hamilton's principle and linear first-order piston theory have been employed to extract the governing equations of motion of the structure. The assumed mode method is used to solve the derived equations and identify the instability region of the sandwich plate. In order to demonstrate validity of the proposed solution, an experiment on a cantilever sandwich plate consisting of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as the face layers and MR fluid (MRF 132DG) as the core layer is conducted. In this study, the primary attention is focused on the effect of MR fluid and aerodynamic damping on the stability of the MR sandwich plates. Furthermore, the effect of magnetic flux, boundary conditions and plate parameters on the flutter boundaries of the sandwich MR plates are investigated. The results highlight the significance of MR fluid and aerodynamic damping in the flutter suppression of the sandwich plate structures, in a wide range of aerodynamic pressure.