A New Concept of an Electrorheological Planar Damper for Independent Damping Adjustment in Planar Movement

In this work, a new concept for a planar electrorheological damper is introduced. By combining the field responsive behaviour of electrorheological fluid with a simple mechanism, the damper is able to deliver two independently adjustable damping forces in two orthogonal directions of movement through only one damping device. The performance of the damper was verified through experiments and its implementation was simulated for a planar positioning system. Both experiments and simulation results have shown that the proposed new planar damper performs promisingly in a system with planar movement.