Publication Date:
2015-04-23
Description:
Magnetorheological (MR) fluids are suspensions of micron-scale magnetizable particles suspended in a carrier fluid. When field is applied, MR fluids develop a field controllable yield stress and a field independent post-yield viscosity. However, this viscosity has substantial temperature dependence, varying by up to an order of magnitude over the operating temperature range of MR fluid devices. We apply non-Brownian suspension theory to explain this result and find that the majority of this effect should be caused by the temperature dependent behavior of the carrier fluid. Thus, if two fluids share the same carrier fluid, then their fluid properties should scale in temperature similarly. This result is first validated by measuring viscosity across temperature for custom model fluids designed to conform to theory, showing temperature scaling within 5% for both the MR fluids and their carrier fluid. Then, on a series of related commercially available fluids with unknown additive content, we show that the MR fluids exhibit common scaling to within 4%. We also investigate the effects of magnetic hysteresis and find that it induces a negligible increase in yield stress and no measurable change in viscosity. We conclude that our non-dimensional analysis enables the temperature dependence of novel MR fluids to be characterized with fewer experiments.
Print ISSN:
0021-8979
Electronic ISSN:
1089-7550
Topics:
Physics
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