A lightweight design method for rotary table inspired by structural bionics

A lightweight design method was put forward with the combination of bionics and structure optimization design. On the basis of similarity analysis, the bionic design of structure is carried out. By employing the central composite design (CCD), the sample points of finite element analysis (FEA) are selected to construct the second-order polynomial response surface model (RSM). Without increasing the structural deformation, the optimal design parameters of bionic structure are obtained by minimizing the mass as objective function. The rotary table structure inspired by the characteristics of giant waterlily is taken as an example. The simulation results indicated that compared with the initial structure, the mass of bionic structure is reduced by 15.09%, and maximum deformation is reduced by 4.56%. Meanwhile, the mass of optimized bionic structure is reduced by 23.63% with the maximum deformation 4.94% reduction, which is significantly better than that of bionic structure. Therefore, the effectiveness of this proposed method is validated.