An invertible hysteresis model for magnetorheological damper with improved adaption capability in frequency and amplitude

Abstract It is found during the tests that the damping characteristics of the magnetorheological (MR) damper vary with the excitation amplitude and frequency. However, the existing MR damper models are not able to accommodate the change of excitation amplitude and frequency, which will lead to significant modeling errors. To deal with this problem, this paper analyzes the experimental data and obtains the regularity of the damping characteristics varying with the excitation. Subsequently, an excitation-adaptive MR damper model is constructed based on the hyperbolic tangent function. The proposed model is not only able to adapt to the change of excitation amplitude and frequency but also able to inverse, which is essential for MR damper controller construction. The fitting results show that compared with the existing models, the three normalized errors of the proposed model are improved from 22.61%, 13.96%, and 19.42%–6.30%, 3.81%, and 6.97%, respectively, indicating that the model excitation adaptivity is significantly improved. Furthermore, this study also proposed a damper controller based on the new model, and the simulation results verify the effectiveness of the controller. The proposed model brings the acceleration signal into the model to improve the model adaptivity, which introduces a novel approach to enhance the adaptivity of MR damper models.