Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Among smart materials, magnetoactive elastomers (MAEs) are truly multifunctional materials as they can vary their dynamic properties (stiffness and damping) semi-actively as well as providing controlled actuation owing to their inherent magnetostriction effect. These properties, combined with their unique features such as flexibility, fail-safe, fast-response (less than few milliseconds) and low-power requirement, have made MAEs revolutionary smart materials for the development of next generation of adaptive structures for wide range of applications, ranging from space structures and transportation systems to civil infrastructure, defense and medical systems. Field-dependent elastic and loss moduli of MAEs have made them ideal smart materials for developing high-bandwidth adaptive energy absorption devices. Such novel smart devices can be integrated within the ground, aerospace and marine vehicle structures for effective mitigation of transmitted vibration, structure-born noise and shocks in real time under unpredictable environmental conditions. The recently developed Hard-MAEs (H-MAEs), where the typically-used soft micro-sized ferromagnetic particles in MAEs are replaced by hard permanent magnetic particles, have shown unique properties. Although the current knowledge on magnetostriction properties of H-MREs is very limited, these have shown reduced modulus by reversing the magnetic field direction and considerable magnetostriction effect that may be exploited for developing novel magnetically driven artificial muscles and soft actuators in biomedical, smart sensors for point-of-care diagnostics, robotics and microfluidic applications. The proposed equipment is a unique device which enable to efficiently and accurately characterize magnetic properties of various magnetoactive materials (MAEs, H-MAEs, Hybrid MAEs, magnetostrictive and magnetoresistive materials) which are of paramount importance for accurate modeling and design optimization of adaptive structures and systems featuring magnetoactive materials. In order to understand the behavior of magnetoactive-based adaptive systems and structures and also to better realize their potential applications, it is extremely important to accurately predict their dynamic characteristics under broad ranges of external excitations and operating factors. The accurate characterizations of magnetic properties of different types of magnetoactive materials under varying magnetic field intensities is thus of paramount importance to build a better understanding of the magnetic properties of magnetoactive materials. The requested equipment with its unique features can be effectively utilized to conduct versatile tests on different types of magnetoactive materials for mapping their magnetic properties under varied applied magnetic field. Such information is critical for developing high-fidelity physic-based models to predict magneto-mechanical behavior of magnetoactive materials.