Structural Design and Controllability of Magnetorheological Grease Buffers under Impact Loading

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

materials-2434998

The hock loads can pose a major threat to personnel or tools, and effective control of the buffering process is an effective means of reducing damage from shock energy. In this paper, the authors present magnetorheological grease as an internally controllable buffer material to address the turbulence and settling problems of conventional magnetorheological fluid. A magnetic circuit with bending and folding back is proposed and the simulation of the magnetic circuit is verified against a dynamic mechanical model and the mechanical response of the buffer under shock loading. The response of the magnetorheological lipid buffer to different impacts with a drop hammer was investigated. The results show that the efficiency of the buffer gradually improves with increasing current, and parameters - 9 ms; 0.5 A, efficient continuous variable current control.

As a person working so long on EPR machine, I htink that presented manuscript is really interesting for the people working in this area. The introduction, measured parameters, discussion and conclusion were present as the journal requerments. The figures are clear and interesting. My only recommendation is to cite new articles - within the last 3 years, thus the presented manuscript will improve its value!

 Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Recommendation: This paper is publishable subject to minor revisions noted. Further review is not needed.

 

Comments: The title of the paper is appropriate. The abstract well summarizes the approach and the main results. The paper is well structured. In the introduction, the work has been put into the proper context of previously published research. Simulation methods corresponding to field simulation analysis are adequately described, and figures are well illustrated. The experimental work fully supports conclusions. However, the submitted manuscript requires minor corrections as noted below:

 

1.     Grammatical issues – provided separately.

2. Missing product details (major concern leading to the inadequate description of the methods involved) – Proper information regarding products and instruments used in the experimental design should be provided and this is missing in multiple instances. At the very least authors should provide the information on the catalog number of items used along with the manufacturer information:

a.     Page #3, line #122 – Product details on selected MRG are missing

b.  Page #13, line #333 – Grammatical issues. + Provide detailed functional information on how the test bench was made and the product information on the components involved

                  i.     A connection diagram could be helpful if authors struggle to provide these details in wording.

3.     Other issues:

a.     Figure-9 – It should be clarified in the figure caption that the presented results are simulation outputs.

b.     Figure-10 is nowhere referenced in the manuscript. One or two sentences should be added referencing the same.

c.     Page #9 – Information regarding the displacement of the field sensor used to obtain the recordings should be provided. The changes in the magnetic field readings seem too sudden around the internal guide rings which could also result from sparse positioning/ recordings of the magnetic field strength. If that was the case, it should be clarified by providing the positioning/displacement where magnetic field values were noted.

d.     Page #10 – The signal chain used in the mechanical properties testing setup should be explained. Particularly how the measurements were taken. Specific information should be provided regarding how different elements in the setup are interconnected and how each individual component was utilized for experimental realization and the associated data collection.

e.     Page #16, line #386 – “Figures 4-5” are incorrectly referenced.

f.   Page #17 – A comparative analysis of how automated variable control setup fares compared to the constant current setups would benefit the quality of this work.

The manuscript has major linguistic issues, and it would be advisable to have it reviewed by a native English speaker before resubmission. A few of such problems are mentioned below:

a.     Page #1, line #17 – repeated wordings regarding “buffer performance” should be corrected.

b.     Page #3, lines #97-100 – these sentences are incoherent. Just an example would be “can not be magnetized control”, which should read “cannot be magnetically controlled”

c.     Page #4, line #144 – “Current size” should read “current value”. Multiple repetitions of this issue were noted.

d.     Page #5, line #156 – “A MR buffer” should read “An MR buffer”

e.     Page #5, lines #158, 161 – “magnetic inductor lines” should be “magnetic induction lines”. This issue has been repeated in multiple instances.

f.      Page #7, lines #193-194 are incoherent

g.     Page #7, line #201 – Incomplete sentence “It can be seen in Figure 7.”

h.     Page #11, line #273 – Figures 13(b) and (c) are not velocity versus displacement graphs, but rather a velocity versus time and displacement versus time. They should be correctly referenced.

i.      Page #15, line #353 – “Figgure” should be “Figure”

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper describes the Structural design and controllability of magnetorheological grease buffers under impact loading. The research innovation of this paper is low. The methodology of individual experiments is often missing in the paper. My selected major and minor comments can be seen below.

Page 1, line 39

I recommend to add this information: „… fast response time of magnetic field [1] and MRF fluid itself [2].“ [1] DOI: 10.3390/ma14102500 or  10.1088/0964-1726/15/2/015; [2] 10.1088/0964-1726/15/1/036 or 10.1088/1361-665X/ac3437

Page 1, line 43

“Xu et al. [?]”. The reference is missing.

Figure 3

Could you add some details about the measurement methodology? Measurement method, device, etc.

Page 5, line 167

The main reason for rods is the volume compensation of the piston rod. Could you add this information to the paper, please?

Page 7, line 191

“… The peak magnetic field strength is 3.51T when the current is 2A.”. This is probably some nonsense. 3.51 Tesla in the magnetic circuit? Could you add some explanation, please? This is probably some numerical simulation error.

Figure 9

Y axis is wrong. This is magnetic flux density!!!!!!!!

Figure 11

Could you add some methodology of magnetic field measurement, please?

Page 11, line 265

Could you add some calculations of weight impact velocities, please? I think the impact velocities in Figure 13 are too high (25 m/s) for free-fall motion.

Page 13, line 328

The data you measured is in the usual time responses of MR dampers. Provide some comparison with existing papers.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

I have no more comments.