The effect analysis of MRE’s component to the damper’s character based on the system dynamic model

Magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) exemplify field-responsive smart materials where tunable damping emerges from magnetic-field-dependent interfacial slippage between carbonyl iron particles (CIP) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT). While critical for adaptive vibration control in reconfigurable robotics and aerospace actuators, current designs correlate component fractions with quasi-static properties-neglecting frequency-dependent interfacial recovery kinetics that govern real-time adaptability in dynamic environments. Therefore, in this research, a fixture-MRE damper-workpiece dynamic model considering contact effect is constructed using the generalized Lagrange equations to study the impact of CIP volume fraction and MWCNT mass fraction on the MRE damper’s dynamic characteristics. To exhaustively exploit the model’s capabilities, the specific form of the magnetic flux density at any point is derived with Biot–Savart–Laplace theorem and Laplace equation in spherical coordinates. And the transfer function of this system in multi-degree-of-freedom with damping effect is carried out. The damping coefficient in this model is identified by the tension–compression test. The contributions of both CIP and MWCNT fractions to this dynamic model have been studied; both positively increase the transfer function’s peak gains. The dynamic model’s accuracy is verified by comparing the natural frequency with the one collected by the experiment platform constructed in this paper, whose percentage relative errors for natural frequency below 5% in 61 of 64 CIP-based tests and under 6% in 60 of 64 MWCNT cases. All these results indicate the high accuracy of the model constructed in this research, which could be the significantly robust foundation for future real-time magnetic-tuning of damping behavior and 3D-printed graded MREs-advancing SMS’s mission of self-adapting composites in intelligent systems.