Virtual machine tools have been magnified recently as manufacturers could estimate performances of machine tools before design and manufacturing of them. However, it requires much time and efforts to make FEM models and predict precision of machine tools well because machine tools are composed of many joints such as bolt joints, LM joints, rotational bearing joints and mounts. Especially, we have studied computational modeling methods of bolt joints to predict precision of machine tools well in this paper. Stiffness and damping coefficients of bolt joints are investigated and generalized with respect to fasten forces through experiments and FEM analysis. Matrix 27 element of ANSYS is used and bolt joints are simplified as square areas with 8 nodes to apply stiffness and damping simultaneously. Additionally, coordinate transformation of matrix 27 for bolt joints is induced to apply to skewed bolt joints of machine tools and evaluate it using FEM analysis.
