Abstract: Hydraulic manifold blocks play an important role in engineering applications. With the development of industrial upgrading, it gradually requires such heavy and bulky components to realize an improvement in the aspects of weight reduction and power-to-weight ratio, but traditional processing manners can not assist engineers to meet those demands. Additive Manufacturing is a promising technology utilizing digital geometry models to fabricate parts in a layer by layer manner, whose unique formation mechanism is of great potential and advantage in designing and producing complex component with inner hollow channels. A mathematic model for typical Y-shaped fluid channels inspired by the characteristic of bifurcation in leaf veins is established with the support of selective laser melting, and its feasibility has been validated through Computational Fluid Dynamics. In addition, a traditional suspension valve has been successfully optimized via AM under the construction of bionics, the re-designed block realizes a weight reduction of 62% in contrast to the original one without expanding the total spatial volume, and its pressure loss also achieves a reduction of 68% with regard to the previous value. It strongly supports that using bionics of the bifurcation of leaf veins to optimize hydraulic manifold blocks fabricated on AM is an effective way to achieve the goals of weight reduction and fluid performance improvement.

Key words: additive manufacturing, hydraulic manifold blocks, bionics, weight reduction, fluid performance improvement