Applications of electro-rheological fluids in vibration control: a survey

Electro-rheological (ER) fluids are now regarded as one of the most versatile of the materials available for building smart structures and machines. In principle, ER fluids promise an elegant means of providing continuously variable forces for the control of mechanical vibrations. In practice, the development of industrial devices has been hampered by the unavailability of suitable ER fluids. Prompted by recent advances in ER fluid development this paper provides a comprehensive survey of ER devices for vibration control. The key modes of operation are identified and progress towards a unified approach to visualizing the macroscopic behaviour is summarized before presenting a comprehensive survey which includes contributions to the identification of ER fluid dynamics and the application of feedback control. The discussion of results includes some thoughts on future trends.