Multi-frequency excitation of magnetorheological elastomer-based sandwich beam with conductive skins

The present work deals with the dynamic stability of a symmetric sandwich beam with magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) embedded viscoelastic core and conductive skins subjected to time varying axial force and magnetic field. The conductive skins induce magnetic loads and moments under the application of magnetic field during vibration. The MRE part works in shear mode and hence the dynamic properties of the sandwich beam can be controlled by magnetic fields due to the field dependent shear modulus of MRE material. Considering the core to be incompressible in transverse direction, classical sandwich beam theory has been used along with extended Hamilton's principle and Galarkin's method to derive the governing equation of motion. The resulting equation reduces to that of a multi-frequency parametrically excited system. Second order method of multiple scales has been used to study the stability of the system for simply supported and clamped free sandwich beams. Here the experimentally obtained properties of magnetorheological elastomers based on natural rubber have been considered in the numerical simulation. The results suggest that the stability of the MRE embedded sandwich beam can be improved by using magnetic field.     

Nonlinear response of a flexible Cartesian manipulator with payload and pulsating axial force

In this present work, the nonlinear response of a single-link flexible Cartesian manipulator with payload subjected to a pulsating axial load is determined. The nonlinear temporal equation of motion is derived using D’Alembert’s principle and generalised Galerkin’s method. Due to large transverse deflection of the manipulator, the equation of motion contains cubic geometric and inertial types of nonlinearities along with linear and nonlinear parametric and forced excitation terms. Method of normal forms is used to determine the approximate solution and to study the dynamic stability and bifurcations of the system. These results are found to be in good agreement with those obtained by numerically solving the temporal equation of motion. Influences of amplitude of the base excitation, mass ratio, and amplitude of static and dynamic axial load on the steady state responses of the system are investigated for three different resonance conditions. For some specific conditions, the results obtained in this work are found to be in good agreement with the previously published experimental work. The results obtained in this work will find applications in the design of flexible Cartesian manipulators with payload.