Influences of Geometry of Particles on Electrorheological Fluids

Electrorheological (ER) fluids with microspheres and micro-rods as the component solid phase were examined experimentally to investigate the influences of particle geometry on ER performance. It is observed that for both dried and water-activated ER fluids, the shape of the constituent particles plays a significant role, i.e. for particles with same diameters, the microsphere-based ER fluids show better ER performance than micro-rod-based ER fluids. We found from experiments that the aspect ratio of particles is an important parameter for the ER activities. The tendency is that the ER effect decreases with the increase of the aspect ratio, while this phenomenon becomes much weaker in the case when dried particles were substituted for the ones with moisture.