An interpretable unsteady flow model for membrane structure shear-valve type magnetorheological damper

The study introduces an innovative, interpretable, nonlinear damping hysteresis model for membrane structure shear-valve magnetorheological dampers anchored in non-Newtonian fluid mechanics. In addition to the fluid mechanism, the model takes into account the hysteresis phenomenon of magnetic fluids. Drawing upon the parallel plate model—predominantly utilized in steady-state analyses—the Laplace transform is employed to solve the transient fluid constitutive equation in the [Formula: see text]-domain, drawing parallels with Newtonian fluids and introducing robust prior conditions to minimize the problem-solving scale. A fast inverse Laplace transformation algorithm is applied to achieve the numerical solution in the time domain. This model can be quickly built from the damper’s design parameters, laying the foundation for swift, and proficient damper control. Furthermore, a novel membrane-structured shear-valve-type MR damper is designed and fabricated, which exhibits minimal passive damping and accurately reflects the genuine fluid dynamic characteristics, optimizes the methodology for calculating the damper’s magnetic field and acquires damping characteristic curves to authenticate the proposed unsteady flow model. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that our proposed model dispenses the need for a priori damping characteristic data, provides robust computational speed and precision, and maintains interpretability.