Efficient design of a magneto-rheological fluid embedded pneumatic vibration isolator considering practical constraints

Abstract

An efficient systematic design of a magneto-rheological fluid embedded pneumatic vibration isolator (MrEPI) considering practical constraints is proposed. The design is accomplished from three aspects including system level design for synthesizing appropriate non-dimensional system parameters of pneumatic spring and MR damping elements through performance sensitivity analysis considering compact and efficient hardware utilization, component level design for synthesizing optimal design of the MR valve through employing an objective function with preset index for guaranteeing required worst-case performance, and dimensional realization level design for determining actual plant parameters from aforementioned level designs according to practical constraints. In addition, the vibration control performance of the optimally designed MrEPI system under harmonic disturbances is evaluated, which shows good isolation performance under different stiffness.