An Arrayed Giant Electrorheological Fluid Damper With Energy Harvesting and Tunable-Damping Capacity

Magnetorheological (MR) dampers with energy harvesting capacity have received extensive investigation as regenerative and variable dampers. However, the power consumption and driving current of MR dampers are too high to be satisfied by the integrated energy harvesters. In this article, we propose a giant electrorheological fluid (GERF) based shear-mode damper whose damping coefficients can be tuned remarkably with low power consumption. An electromagnetic energy harvester (EMEH) is integrated into an electrode plate array for scavenging ambient vibration energy. Mimicking a commercial electric mosquito swatter, a power management circuit is developed to rectify and amplify the voltage output of the EMEH. We use finite-element analysis and experiments to characterize the energy harvesting performance of the GERF damper. The maximum power output of the EMEH is 0.47 W under an excitation with a frequency of 16 Hz and an amplitude of 5 mm. We propose two energy feedback operation modes for tuning the damping coefficients of the damper. The first approach utilizes the energy scavenged from the EMEH as a power source and the second uses a high-voltage power supply to drive the electrode plates. The experimental results demonstrate that the velocity amplitude of a vibration isolation system with energy feedback reduces by 2.7 times compared with a passive system.