Abstract: Human motion induced vibration has very low frequency, ranging from 2 Hz to 5 Hz. Traditional vibration isolators are not effective in low-frequency regions due to the trade-off between the low natural frequency and the high load capacity. In this paper, inspired by the human spine, we propose a novel bionic human spine inspired quasi-zero stiffness (QZS) vibration isolator which consists of a cascaded multi-stage negative stiffness structure. The force and stiffness characteristics are investigated first, the dynamic model is established by Newton's second law, and the isolation performance is analyzed by the harmonic balance method (HBM). Numerical results show that the bionic isolator can obtain better low-frequency isolation performance by increasing the number of negative structure stages, and reducing the damping values and external force values can obtain better low-frequency isolation performance. In comparison with the linear structure and existing traditional QZS isolator, the bionic spine isolator has better vibration isolation performance in low-frequency regions. It paves the way for the design of bionic ultra-low-frequency isolators and shows potential in many engineering applications.

Key words: bionic spine inspired vibration isolator, harmonic balance method (HBM), quasi-zero stiffness (QZS), ultra-low frequency vibration isolation