Electronically Controlled Power Steering (ECPS) system is one of the new Power Steering systems with improved stability at high speed condition compared with the conventional Power Steering system. Most ECPS systems are complex and expensive. In order to cope with above problems, we propose a new ECPS system, which uses Magneto-Rheological Fluid(MRF) and can be added to the conventional Power Steering system without major modification.
MRF, which is one type of controllable fluid, changes its rheological characteristics from Newtonian fluid to Bingham fluid as the magnetic field is applied. It has several advantages such as high strength, robustness in impurities and wide operational temperature range.
In order to confirm performance of the developed MR damper for new ECPS systems, we perform experiments based on PID control and the demagnetization phenomenon of MRF. The experimental results show feasibility of the proposed device even though more study about demagnetization and improvement of the response time of MR device are needed as future studies.
