A tunable stiffness and damping vibration isolator based on magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) is developed. In this isolator, four MRE elements are used as the tunable springs, whose stiffness can be controlled by varying the magnetic field. A voice coil motor, which is controlled by the relative velocity feedback of the payload, is used as the tunable damper of the isolator. Under the combined ON–OFF control, the proposed vibration isolator shows satisfying isolation effect. The experimental results indicate that the responses of the payload are suppressed significantly in comparison to the passive system. The transmissibility of the payload around the resonant frequency is decreased by 61.5%. The root mean square (RMS) value and the maximum value of the displacement responses of the payload are decreased by 36.0% and 50.0%, respectively. In addition, the RMS values and maximum values of the velocity responses are decreased by 45.4% and 52.5%, respectively.

This paper presents an active-adaptive tuned vibration absorber (AATVA) which is based on magnetorheological elastomer (MRE). A voice coil motor is attached to a conventional MRE adaptive tuned vibration absorber (ATVA) to improve its performance. In this study, two feedback types of the activation force were analyzed and the stability condition was obtained. In order to eliminate the time delay effect during the signal processing, a phase-lead compensator was incorporated. Based on the analysis, an MRE AATVA prototype was designed and its dynamic properties were experimentally investigated. The experimental results demonstrated that its resonant frequency could vary from 11 to 18 Hz and its damping ratio decreased to roughly 0.05 from 0.19 by adding the activation force. Besides, its vibration reduction abilities at the first two resonant frequencies of the experimental platform could reach 5.9 dB and 7.9 dB respectively.