Study on the Shock Absorber Using Multielectrode Electro-Rheological Valve

This paper studies the generation of damping forces of shock absorbers using the multielectrode electrorheological valve (ER valve) of flow mode. Due to the fact that the size of electrode affects the magnitude of damping force, we design two shock absorbers using the multielectrode ER valves to study the effect of multielectrode arrangement. One of the absorber utilizes one to five electrode gaps of parallel arrangement, while the other has one to three electrode gaps of serial arrangement. The silicone oil-based ER fluid is prepared in our lab for the experiments. The results from theoretical and experimental studies show that the damping force generated using the one electrode gap is the maximum among the multielectrode of parallel arrangement. The resultant damping force is larger as the number of gaps is increased for the serial arrangement of the multielectrode. Thus, we conclude that the serial arrangement of multielectrode is more suitable for shock absorbers which require high damping force output.