Compression Enhanced Shear Yield Stress of Electrorheological Fluid

Shear tests of an electrorheological fluid with pre-applied electric field and compression along the field direction are carried out. The results show that pre-compressions can increase the shear yield stress up to ten times. Under the same external electric field strength, a higher compressive strain corresponds to a larger shear yield stress enhancement but with slight current density decrease, which shows that the particle interaction potentials are not increased by compressions but the compression-induced chain aggregation dominates the shear yield stress improvement. This pre-compression technique might be useful for developing high performance flexible ER or magnetorheological couplings.