The Method of Tolerance Analysis Base on the Monte Carlo

Abstract

The primary goal of concurrent engineering is to minimize the time spend and to reduce quality problems encountered between a product's conception and customer use, thereby minimizing cost and maximizing product quality. Tolerance is an important index of product design and manufacture. Although they are small as compared with part dimensions, tolerances can propagate and accumulate in an assembly affecting the product assimilability. Moreover, tolerance is inevitable because manufacturing exactly equal parts is known to be impossible. This paper presents a brief review of statistical tolerance and clearance analysis for the assembly, and proposes a method of tolerance analysis by a leading commercial computer-aided tolerance (CAT) analysis system, VisVSA. This method can ensure assembly precision requirements, and design optimally tolerance distribution based on Monte Carlo simulation, take a example of brake assembly to detailed introduce the use of this method. The purpose of this article is expected to make the following contributions: (i) to help the designers to evaluate products for assimilability, (ii) to provide a new perspective to tolerance problems, and (iii) to provide a tolerance analysis tool, VisVSA, which can be incorporated into a CAD or solid modeling system.