Sang-Won Cho

Smart Passive System Based on MR Damper

Magnetorheological(MR) dampers are one of the most promising semi active control devices, because they have advantages such as small power requirement, reliability, and low price to manufacture. To reduce the responses of structures with MR dampers, a control system including power supply, controller, and sensors is required. However, when a mount of MR dampers are used to a large?scale civil structure such as cable stayed bridges, the control system becomes complex. Therefore, it is not easy to install and maintain the MR damper based control system. To resolve above difficulties, This paper proposes a smart passive system that consists of a MR damper and an electromagnetic induction(EMI) system. According to the Faraday’s law of induction, EMI system that is attached to the MR damper produces electric energy. The produced energy is supplied to the MR damper. Thus, the MR damper with EMI system does not require any power at all. Furthermore, the induced electric energy is proportional to external loads like earthquakes, which means the MR damper with EMI system is adaptable to external loads without any controller and corresponding sensors. Therefore, it is easy to build up and maintain the proposed smart passive system.