Development of a Rotary Damper Integrated with Magnetorheological Bearings toward Extremely High Torque–Volume Ratio

Magnetorheological (MR) technology has provided effective solutions to many engineering bottleneck problems due its controllable nature. However, designing a rotary MR damper with high torque–volume ratio is always challenging, especially for some specific application scenarios constrained space, such as robot joints. To solve this problem, based on bearings was designed and evaluated in study. In damper, two are utilized provide damping torques serve rotors, which greatly saves space while providing torque. This feature grants the characteristics of compact design ratio. Quasistatic testing shows that torque can reach 2.92 Nm when applied current 1.2 A. It achieves 190 kN/m2, nearly four times higher than existing dampers. The experimental results show proposed satisfying requirement limited space.