• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.27-38
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• 1997

ER clutch is a device using ER fluid, so called "intelligent material" and is a power transmission system controlled with electric field strength. This device responses very rapidly when controlled by rapid and continuous electrical signal and can form a servosystem. Wear, noise and vibration during operation is very low level. This study was undertaken to investigate substitutive possibilities of this ER clutch for existing power transmission mechanism. An analytic relationships using rheological model (so called, 'Bingham plastic model') of ER fluid were developed, and operation constraints and optimum design concepts were constructed. With this relationships, typical responses of ER clutch and effects of changing geometric, kinetic parameters of ER clutch and ER fluid properties were described. In conclusion, compared with existing mechanisms, an excellent performance of ER clutch was confirmed.confirmed.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.63-68
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• 2004

Recently ER fluids are put to practical use in fluid power industry field. As only with electrical signal change to the valve in which ER fluid flowing, ER fluid flow is controlled, so devepment of simple ER valves have been tried. In this case a technical problem is to check the pressure drop caused from flow rate change in valves because the pressure drop is very small. In this study ER valves are designed and manufactured, and small pressure drop induced from flow rate change is checked by pressure transducer which is made with appling strain gage. The ER valves and pressure drop check method are considered to be applied to the fluid power industry.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.16 no.5 s.98
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• pp.104-111
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• 1999

A semi-active suspension system for a vehicle using an Electrorheological Fluid damper has been studied. Apparent viscosity of ERF(Electrorheological Fluid) can be changed rapidly by applying electric field. The damping force of ER damper can be selectively controlled by employing electric field to the ER fluid domain. This paper deals with a two-degree-of-freedom suspension using the ER damper for a quarter car model. An intelligent control method using fuzzy control with genetic algorithm has been employed to control the damping force of the ER damper. The GA designs the optimal structure and performance of Fuzzy Net Controller having hybrid structure. The designed fuzzy net controller has been compared with the skyhook type controller for a quarter car model. The computer simulation results show that the semi-active suspension with ER damper has a good performance in the sense of ride quality with less vibration for ground vehicle.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.612-618
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• 2003

A hybrid vibration control scheme using ER fluid and PZT patches is proposed. Dynamic characteristics of the beam embedded with the ER fluid can be controled by changing the strength of the electric field applied on the ER fluid, thus provides a mean to avoid the resonance. It was found that active vibration control of the structure embedded with ER fluid failed to suppress the vibration excited with broad band frequency due to the limited change of the dynamic characteristics of the structure. To compensate this limited effect of the control scheme with ER fluid alone, PPF control using PZT patches as sensors and actuators is added to construct a hybrid controller. Experimental results suggests that proposed hybrid controller is effective to suppress the additional resonance vibration that appears when each controller is used alone.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
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• 1998.10a
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• pp.203-211
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• 1998

ER clutch is a device using electro-rheological fluid which is one of so called intelligent materials. Power transmission behavior of an ER clutch can be controlled by electrical field applied tb the fluid. In this work, a new type of servomechanism is developed with two ER clutchs, driven by two electrical motors rotating in reverse directions. The concentric cylinder type ER clutch is operated by PID control. The system shows good angular position control characteristics with respect to sinusoidal and square inputs.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.1-11
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• 1998

This paper presents performance analyses of three types of the cylindrical-type ER(electro-rheo-logical) valves, which have different electrode length and width but same electrode area. Following the composition of silicone oil-based ER fluid, the field-dependent yield stresses are obtained from experimental investigation on the Bingham property of the ER fluid. The ER valve which is dependent on the applied electric field is devised and its theoretical model is derived. On the basis of the pressure-drop analysis, three types of the ER valves are designed and manufactured. After experimentally evaluation field-dependent pressure drops, PI controller is formulated to achieve tracking control on desired pressure drop. The controller is then experimentally implemented and tracking control performance is presented in order to demonstrate superior controllability of the ER valve. In addition, the response characteristic of the ER valve with respect to the excitation frequency of the electric fiedls is provided to show the feasibility of practical application.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.157-162
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• 2003

This Paper presents a robust design of an Electrorheological(ER) damper using Taguchi method. Taguchi method is a robust design method that determines control parameters in the presence of noise effect. Electrode length, electrode gap, base oil viscosity and the weight ratio of ER particles are chosen for the control parameters and the temperature is considered to be a noise factor. The sensitivity of each factor with signal-to-noise(S/N) ratio and analysis of variance are investigated. The analysis results show that the electrode length and base oil viscosity of the ER fluid mostly affect the damping force in the absence of electric field. On the other hand, when the voltage is applied to the ER damper, the electrode length and the weight ratio of ER fluid exhibit significant effect. Based on the Taguchi method, an optimal configuration was designed and the robustness of the designed ER damper was validated by comparing the analysis and experimental results.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.7-13
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• 2010

This experimental study presents tribological characteristics under boundary lubrication contacts associated with electrorheolocal (ER) fluid. ER fluid is prepared by using phosphorated starch particles and silicone oil. Experimental apparatus of tribological tester is designed and constructed to evaluate tribological characteristics of pin specimens. Wear tests under boundary lubrication of ER fluid are experimentally performed under consideration of several operational factors such as normal load, sliding distance, sliding speed and specimen materials: steel, copper and aluminum. After wear test, microscopic surface changes of the worn pin specimens are analyzed in order to investigate measured wear characteristics by using the scanning electron microscope (SEM) as well as surface profilometer. In addition, the chemical wear characteristics are investigated by using energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS). Moreover, friction coefficient measurements under different materials of pin specimens are conducted for the tribological investigations. In order to verify the effect of starch phosphate particles in ER fluid, the wear test results with ER fluid are compared with test results with only silicone oil. The results clearly present that the phosphorated starch based ER fluid shows the stabilized wear as well as friction characteristics after run-in operations, but the wear rate under ER fluid is increased.

• Journal of KSNVE
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.301-306
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• 2001

Electro-Rheological (ER) fluid is applied to a controllable squeeze film damper (SFD) for stabilizing a flexibly supported rotor system. ER fluid is a class of functional fluid whose yield stress varies according to the applied electric field strength, which is observed as viscosity variation of the fluid. In applying ER fluid to a SFD, a pair of rings of the damper can be used as electrodes. When the electrodes are divided into a horizontal pair and a vertical one, the SFD can produce damping force in each direction independently. A prototype of the directionally controllable SFD was constructed and its performance was experimentally and numerically investigated in the present work.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.29-35
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• 2003

In this research 4 plate type ER-Valves which have same surface but different width and length are designed and an experimental apparatus is constructed. With this experimental apparatus, flow rate and pressure drop of ER fluid flowing in ER-valves are measured with varying electric field strength of ER-valve, and relation between valve types and pressure drop is also experimented. ER fluid is made silicon oil mixed with 40wt% starch having hydrous particles. If we allow the same electric field in the ER-Valve, we came to how that the pressure drop is effected by the electrode length and electrode width. When the strength of the electric field increased, the pressure drop happened big and the flow rate decreased.