15 Magneto-mechanical properties of elastic hybrid composites

The paper gives an overview of tunable elastic magnetic composites based on silicon rubbermatrix highly filled with amagnetic soft and hard filler. Themagnetic soft phase, which is represented by iron microparticles, allows active control of the physical properties of the composites, while the magnetically hard phase (e.g. neodymium–iron–boron alloy microparticles) is mainly responsible for passive adjustment of the composite. The control is performed by the application of an external magnetic field in situ, and passive adjustment is performed by means of premagnetization in order to change material remanent magnetization, i.e. the initial state. The potential and limits of active control and passive tuning of these composites in terms of their magneto-mechanical behavior are presented and discussed.