Small Scale Mr Damper : Design,fabrication and Evaluation

This article presents the results of an experimental investigation on a developed small scale MR damper for seismic response reduction in buildings. The damper is designed for a target capacity of 2kN.The damper was design and fabricated based on the principle of shear mode. Testing was done using MTS servo hydraulic UTM and the results were obtained as Force-velocity and Force displacement plot based on the real time data collected through MTS suite. The force corresponding to all the excitation frequency is obtained and has been plotted as force-velocity so as to compare the percentage increase in damping force. Maximum force was obtained as 252.4N at 1hz and minimum force as 175.9N at 0.1hz with corresponding velocity of 31.2mm/s for 1hz and 3.5mm/s for 0.2hz respectively. The experiment proves that with displacement control and variable excitation frequency, the velocity of the MR damper varies, and as a result, the damping force increases as frequency increases which is the main finding of this paper.