Tolerance Analysis of 2-D and 3-D Mechanical Assemblies with Small Kinematic Adjustments

Assembly tolerance analysis is a key element in industry for improving product quality and reducing overall cost. It provides a quantitative design tool for predicting the effects of manufacturing variation on performance and cost. It promotes concurrent engineering by bringing engineering requirements and manufacturing requirements together in a common model. A new method, called the Direct Linearization Method (DLM), is presented for tolerance analysis of 2-D and 3-D mechanical assemblies, which generalizes vector loop-based models to include small kinematic adjustments. It has a significant advantage over traditional tolerance analysis methods in that it does not require an explicit function to describe the relationship between the resultant assembly dimension(s) and manufactured component dimensions. Such an explicit assembly function may be difficult or impossible to obtain for complex assemblies. The DLM method is a convenient design tool. The models are constructed of common engineering elements: vector chains, kinematic joints, assembly datums, dimensional tolerances, geometric feature tolerances and assembly tolerance limits. It is well suited for integration with a commercial CAD system as a graphical front end. It is not computationally intensive, so it is ideally suited for iterative design. A general formulation is derived, detailed modeling and analysis procedures are outlined, and the method is applied to two example problems.