New advances in design and preparation of electrorheological materials and devices

Electrorheological (ER) fluid is a smart suspension, whose structure and rheological properties can be quickly tuned by an external electric field. This character attracts high attentions in use of conventional and intelligent devices. In this article, we introduce new advances in design and preparation of ER materials based on two routes including molecular & crystal structure design and nanocomposite & hybrid design. And we specially present some advanced preparation techniques, such as self-assembly, nanocomposite, hybrid, and so on, in order to achieve the design about physical and chemical properties of high-performance ER materials. Furthermore, we present new self-coupled dampers based on ER fluid and piezoelectric ceramic for vibration control, and a flexible sandwiched ER composite for sound transmission control. This new damper works depending on self-coupling effect between ER fluid and piezoelectric ceramic and does not need the external power supply.