Abstract

I will be giving a talk on Magneto-Rheological fluids (MR) and their applications. MR fluids were first invented in 1940 but have started gaining increased interest recently. Smart fluids such as MR fluids have lately been used in the automotive industry e.g. as shock absorbers and in seismic dampers in earthquake prone areas. Audi also recently introduced their version of a shock absorber in their 2’nd generation Audi TT cars. I will be presenting how these smart fluids are fabricated in the laboratory and talk about their structural and magnetic properties as measured using Electron microscopy (SEM, TEM ) and VSM magnetometry. MR fluids are dispersions of fine magnetically soft, multi-domain particles. On applying an external magnetic field on the fluid, properties such as the ‘Yield stress’ can change in milliseconds. This rapid change in behavior of the fluid can be exploited using an electronic feedback circuit mechanism, which I have built and will be discussing in detail along with many other auxiliary experiments.