Investigation on controllability of a Magnetorheological gun recoil damper

Its primary purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive investigation on the controllability of a magnetorheological (MR) gun recoil damper. Performances of MR damper under random load, mainly in the transportation applications, seismic protection in civil engineering and wind-rain-induced load in cable bridge, have been well investigated by many researchers. However, little research has been focused on the dynamic performance and its controllability of MR damper under impact load. At present, a systematic architecture has still not been formed, including its structure design, dynamic-modelling and controlling method of a MR damper subjected to impact load. In this paper, the research is developed and aims at the MR gun recoil damper. To evaluate its controllability of a MR gun recoil damper, a test rig which uses a closed bump to produce an impact load is developed. A novel large-scale single-ended MR damper without the accumulator is used as the specimen. First, impact tests were done to evaluate the response time of the special designed long-stroke MR gun recoil damper, corresponding to the step signal of the operating current. Then, three revised control strategies, including on-off control method, PID control method, adaptive fuzzy control method, were investigated to confirm its controllability of the MR damper under impact load. Compared with on-off control and PID control policy, it is indicated by test results that this developed MR gun recoil damper has a better controllability using the adaptive fuzzy control policy.