Aiming at the problem that the axial vibration of the ball screw feed system affects the machining quality and accuracy retention of the workpiece,the magnetorheological damper was applied to the axial vibration suppression of the ball screw feed system of machine tools.The magnetorheological (MR) damper was designed,and the damping force was identified by the least square method and BP neural network through the MR damper damping characteristics experiment.A single degree of freedom vibration model of machine tool ball screw feed system with MR damper was established,and the dynamic response of the system was calculated based on Runge-Kutta method.The results show that:the system can quickly tend to be stable as the input current of the damper increases; it can be seen from the amplitude frequency curve that it is feasible to suppress the vibration of the ball screw feed system with the MR damper.Finally,the experiment verifies that the MR damper can well restrain the vibration of the ball screw feed system.