Experimental evaluation of magneto-rheological devices for impact reduction control in gun recoil system using adaptive hybrid skyhook active force control

This paper presents experimental results for impact reduction of a gun recoil system equipped in a light-armoured military vehicle using a magneto-rheological (MR) device associated with a new adaptive hybrid skyhook active force control (HySAFC). The main motivation of this work is to resolve some drawbacks of conventional hydraulic damper system such as high maintenance cost, oil leakage and slow response by utilizing controllability of the impact intensity incorporating an appropriate controller. To address the solution of the problem, the MR device consists of two key components, namely MR elastomer isolator device (MREID) and MR fluid damper (MRFD) is proposed. Both devices are installed in parallel to the gun recoil system to achieve high performance: MREID (two stages of coil turns, five MRE layers with 2 mm thickness plates) and MRFD (RD-8040, Lord Corp.). Then, the HySAFC is formulated to unwanted vibration/shock caused from the impact force and implemented to the gun recoil system of a specially instrumented light-armoured vehicle. The effectiveness of the proposed vibration/shock control system is evaluated through hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS). It is demonstrated that the proposed MR device-based system with the adaptive HySAFC shows a promising potential to mitigate unwanted recoil energy up to 51% which is much higher than the conventional hydraulic damper system.