Electro-rheological (ER) fluids are now regarded as one of the most versatile of the materials available for building smart structures and machines. In principle, ER fluids promise an elegant means of providing continuously variable forces for the control of mechanical vibrations. In practice, the development of industrial devices has been hampered by the unavailability of suitable ER fluids. Prompted by recent advances in ER fluid development this paper provides a comprehensive survey of ER devices for vibration control. The key modes of operation are identified and progress towards a unified approach to visualizing the macroscopic behaviour is summarized before presenting a comprehensive survey which includes contributions to the identification of ER fluid dynamics and the application of feedback control. The discussion of results includes some thoughts on future trends.

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This paper is concerned with the theoretical analysis of the compressive squeeze performance of an electrorheological (ER) fluid sandwiched between two parallel circular electrodes, the upper one fixed and the lower one oscillating sinusoidally normal to its own plane. It is shown how the force transmitted through the fluid on the upper electrode varies with amplitude and frequency of oscillation together with applied potential difference and also how the fluid, modelled by a bi-viscous characteristic, responds when electrically stressed compared with its unstressed, Newtonian counterpart. Finally, the relevance of the theoretical results to the determination of the mechanical properties of an ER fluid in squeeze is discussed.