Performance tests and modeling on high damping magnetorheological elastomers based on bromobutyl rubber

A new kind of magnetorheological elastomer with the matrix of the bromobutyl rubber is developed. The magnetoviscoelasticity properties of the magnetorheological elastomer specimens are investigated with respect to different magnetic fields, displacement amplitudes, and frequencies under sinusoidal loadings. The experimental results show that the shear storage modulus and the loss factor of magnetorheological elastomers increase with the increasing magnetic field, excitation frequency, and the weight fraction of particles, but decrease with the increasing strain amplitude, and the magnetorheological elastomers have a high loss factor which can reach to 0.682. Then, a microphysical model based on the assumption of the chi-square distribution of the distance between adjacent ferromagnetic particles is proposed, which can eliminate the error generated by the assumption of the uniform distribution and describe the magnetorheological effect more exactly. Based on the proposed microphysical model, the magnetoviscoelasticity parameter model is modified to describe the dynamic properties of magnetorheological elastomers. It can be concluded from comparison between the numerical and experimental results that the modified magnetoviscoelasticity parameter model can describe the magnetorheological elastomer’s performance well.