Characterization and modeling of hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers

Hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers are novel magnetoactive materials in which, unlike the soft particle–based magnetorheological elastomers, the particles provide magnetic poles inside the elastomeric medium. Therefore, the stiffness of the hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers can be increased or decreased by applying the magnetic field in the same or opposite direction as the magnetic poles, respectively. In the present work, the viscoelastic properties of hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers operating in shear mode have been experimentally characterized. For this purpose, hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers with 15% volume fraction of NdFeB magnetic particles have been fabricated and then tested under oscillatory shear motion advanced rotational magneto-rheometer to investigate their viscoelastic behavior under varying excitation frequency and magnetic flux density. The influence of the shear strain amplitude and driving frequency is examined under various levels of applied magnetic field ranging from −0.2 to 1.0 T. Finally, a field-dependent phenomenological model has been proposed to predict the variation of storage and loss moduli of hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers under varying excitation frequency and applied magnetic flux density. The results show that the proposed model can accurately predict the viscoelastic behavior of hard magnetic particle–based magnetorheological elastomers under various working conditions.