Microstructure-Based Magneto-Mechanical Modeling of Magnetorheological Elastomer Composites: A Comparable Analysis of Dipole and Maxwell Methods

Magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) are smart composite materials with tunable mechanical properties by ferromagnetic particle interactions. This study applied the microstructure-based dipole and Maxwell methods to evaluate the magneto-mechanical coupling and magnetostrictive responses of MREs, focusing on various particle distributions. The finite element modeling of representative volume elements with fixed volume fractions revealed that the straight chain microstructure exhibits the most significant magnetostrictive effect due to its low initial shear stiffness and significant magnetic force contributions. For particle separations exceeding three radii, the dipole and Maxwell methods yield consistent results for vertically or horizontally aligned particles. For particle separations greater than three radii, the dipole and Maxwell methods produce consistent results for vertically and horizontally aligned particles. However, discrepancies emerge for angled configurations and complex microstructures, with the largest deviation observed in the hexagonal particle distribution, where the two methods differ by approximately 27%. These findings highlight the importance of selecting appropriate modeling methods for optimizing MRE performance. Since anisotropic MREs with straight-chain alignments are the most widely used, our results confirm that the dipole method offers an efficient alternative to the Maxwell method for simulating these structures.