Structural bionic design for a machine tool column based on leaf veins

Some biological structures, such as leaf veins, bamboo and animal bones, have excellent mechanical properties after millions of years evolution. By studying the distribution characteristics of biological structures, the performances of mechanical components can be improved using structural bionic design method. In this paper, the internal stiffening ribs of a machine tool column are rearranged based on the structure of leaf veins, and a bionic column is designed. Static and modal analysis of the conventional and bionic column is conducted to investigate the static and dynamic performances by finite element method. Then, static loading experiment and modal test are carried out for further verification. The simulation results have good agreement with the experiment results. Compared with the conventional column, the maximum deformation of the bionic column in experiment is reduced by 24.69%, and the first six-order natural frequencies of bionic column are increased by 48.39%, 12.98%, 10.70%, 5.11%, 3.07%, and 8.44%, respectively.