1.What Is Tolerance Analysis?

Tolerance analysis is a name given to a number of approaches used today in product

design to understand how imperfections in parts as they are manufactured, and in assemblies as they are put together, affect the capability of a product to meet customer expectations. Tolerance analysis is a way of understanding how sources of variation in part dimensions and assembly constraints propagate across parts and assemblies, and how that total variation affects the capability of a design to achieve its design requirements within the process capabilities of manufacturing organizations and supply chains.

Tolerancing directly influences the cost and performance of products. For example, in electrical devices, safety requires that the power supply be located a certain minimum distance from adjacent components, such as another sheet-metal part, in order to eliminate electrical short circuits across that distance. Tolerance analysis will show whether the nominal clearances the engineer specifies will meet or violate the safety requirement, given manufacturing and assembly variability impact on the minimum clearance.

The biggest misunderstanding in the market today is trying to equate true three-dimensional tolerance analysis with the widespread practice of using a spreadsheet to simplify the problem to a series of one-dimensional or two-dimensional studies and assuming all the tolerances are in the worst-case conditions for analyzing the behavior of parts and assemblies. This simplistic practice does not properly comprehend variation because it involves no statistical techniques and does not consider real world three-dimensional behavior in parts and assemblies that may be significantly different than the simplified tolerance model. Simplifications of tolerance models involve significant user judgment in how close the tolerance model represents true physical contact behavior and then about how to set tolerances based on their sensitivity to the assembly and part behavior. Guesswork such as this rarely ensures that engineers will meet critical design requirements while using the least-expensive manufacturing processes.

With shorter product lifecycles, faster time to market, and tighter cost pressures, the characteristics that differentiate a product from its competitors are now down in the details of a design. Engineers are going to the next order of resolution in order to improve cycle time and quality and to reduce costs. They are looking more closely at why they did not get the exact part and assembly dimensions they expected from manufacturing and then are attempting to optimize the tolerances on the next version of the product. Tolerance optimization during design has a positive impact on the yields coming out of manufacturing, and better yields directly affect product cost and quality. Analyzing tolerances and variations before trying to produce a product also helps engineers avoid time-consuming iterations late in the design cycle.

We are seeing increased reliance on tolerance analysis across many industries as companies seek to gain competitive advantage. For example, the electronics industry is achieving customer satisfaction objectives through a physical shrinking of their products while adding more capabilities. As electronic devices get smaller and more densely packaged, the importance intensifies to more precisely understanding the interaction of manufacturing variation and design tolerances. Likewise, in the aircraft, automotive and medical device industries, liability costs are growing while environmental requirements are being more aggressively imposed such that companies need to understand more precisely what may cause a failure. As engineers examine the interaction of critical components in systems, they are typically performing some level of tolerance analysis.

by: Sigmetrix

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