Characteristic analysis of a novel magnetorheological fabric composite cored flexible sandwich beam with tunable stiffness

This paper focuses on the performance improvement and evaluation of a novel flexible sandwich beam incorporated magnetorheological fluid porous fabric (MRF-PF). As a novel MR material, MRF-PF has been introduced, prepared, and measured to analyze the pre-yield property between complex shear modulus and magnetic fields. MRF-PF is used into the flexible sandwich beam as core layer. Pre-yield property with tunable stiffness is used to adjust the dynamic response. Then, a theoretical model is derived which can precisely describe the performance. Based on experimental results, sandwich beam incorporated MRF-PF has a good performance of controllability. When the magnetic field is applied into the free end, the natural frequency decreases with increasing the currents and filling ratio. In contrast, the frequency and amplitude increase when the clamped end is exposed to the magnetic fields. Comparing with other investigations, this proposed sandwich beam incorporated MRF-PF has a larger frequency range. The first and second natural frequency show the increases of 54.8% and 77.2%, respectively. The reduction of amplitude is closely related to the thickness of face plate. Therefore, the performance of the compound sandwich beam can be significantly improved by MRF-PF.