Damage Compensation Mechanism In Feeding-nectar Insects And Bio-variant Structure Design

With the rapid development of science and technology,the manufacturing industry,as a pillar industry of the national economy,has put forward higher design requirements in order to meet the needs of technological progress and production and life.As a new discipline emerging in recent years,bionics aims to realize and effectively apply through the special structure,behavior and function of graduate students' objects,and through engineering means.Based on the research ideas of bionics,this paper uses the special structure of bee mouthparts and honey-feeding methods as a carrier,combines biological imaging technology and high-speed camera experiments to reveal the honey-bee honey-feeding mechanism,and further advances the design theory and methods of bionic microvariant structures.A honey bee has to visit 3,000 flowers to produce 1-gram nectar with a hairy tongue dipping at an average movement frequency of 5 Hz,and the glossal hairs erect rhythmically,performing like an opening and closing umbrella to trap the nectar.Dipping by a honey bee tongue is a typical micro-fluidic transport with a low Reynolds number.The high intensify of feeding activities inevitably causes damage on the fragile tongue structure.We preliminarily found the evidence that in nature,honey bees with incomplete tongue tips can still load the nectar with hairs erected.Furthermore,the hairs deploy more to form a larger umbrella-like configuration,and the dipping frequency augments when tongues are damaged on the tips,possibly making up for the nectar intake loss caused by structural damage.Here we reveal the functional compensation facilitated by the compliant mechanisms in the honey bee tongue by combining animal experiments and mathematical modeling.We propose a compliant mechanism model to describe the connections embedded in the tongue and illustrate the mechanism of promotion in hair erection angle while tongue damaged.We put forward flow transport model to evaluate nectar intake rate in a damaged tongue considering variations in hair erection angle and dipping frequency.Theoretical analysis indicates that,both variations can compensate for nectar intake loss caused by damaged tongue.These findings are inspiring a new bionic variant structure design idea,we put forward a kind of micro-bionic adaptive variant structure concept design method,which takes the glossal structure in honeybee as the bionic prototype and is guided by the design principle of mechanical structure.These researches have important theoretical significance and practical engineering value for the development of microbionic variant structures.