Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Simulation of Electrorheological Devices

Abstract

Electrorheological fluids are smart materials in so far as they almost instantaneously change their theological properties, in particular their viscosity, under the influence of an outer electric field. Therefore, in applications electrorheological devices offer a more flexible control of power transmission than conventional tools. Appropriate models describing the electrorheological effect and efficient and robust numerical simulation tools provide the basis for an optimal design of such devices. In this paper, we present an extension of the classical viscoplastic Bingham fluid model that can handle complicated device geometries and a variant of the method of augmented Lagrangians with operator splitting as a suitable iterative technique for the computation of the fluid flow. Numerical results are given for an electrorheological clutch and shock absorber. A model validation is presented by a comparison of the simulation results with experimentally obtained data.