Vibration Control of Washing Machine with Magnetorheological Dampers

The manufacturing of washing machines has lately been an important issue for the appliance industry. Current environmental awareness demands the improvement of machine efficiency and increasing of quality of washing processes. Developing of high efficient and high speed spinning washing machines raises the problem of designing smart suspension systems to control vibration and noise in real time. In the paper a horizontal-axis washing machine is under the study. The machine has a drum with perforated walls. In the water extraction process, the drum starts rotation and this gives rise to significant centrifugal imbalance forces and imbalanced rotation of the laundry mass. This results in vibration and shaking. By elimination of such vibrations it will be possible to design more silent washing machines for higher wash loads within the same outside dimensions. In the paper the results of modelling of dynamics of washing machine and designing of smart suspension system comprising magnetoreological dampers for semi-active vibration control are presented. The commercial software MSC.ADAMS/View and MATLAB/Simulink have been used for 3D-modelling of dynamics of washing machine. Both traditional suspension with passive dampers and suspension with magnetoreological dampers are implemented into the developing mathematical models. Identification of passive dampers and magnetoreological dampers dynamics was done based on experimental study. Full scale test rig of washing machine was used for validating the models. The validated model has been used for designing and optimization of smart suspension system with magnetoreological dampers of high speed spinning washing machines. Analysis of the obtained results has proved a big potential of utilization of magnetoreological dampers for developing of semi-active suspension systems for washing machines