Magneto-rheological foams capable of tunable energy absorption

While foams are widely used for absorbing kinetic energy, their capacities of energy absorption are generally not tunable in applications In this paper, Magneto-rheological elastomers have been fabricated into the form of foams Here, we show that the magneto-rheological foams can significantly vary their capacities of energy absorption in response to uniform magnetic fields We develop a theoretical model to account for the magneto-mechanical properties of magneto-rheological foams We find that the tunable energy absorption of magneto-rheological foams is mainly attributed to the Maxwell stress induced by the applied magnetic field. The theoretical prediction matches well with experimental results.