Unique transfer of functional requirements into manufacturing dimensions in an interactive design context

Abstract

Tolerance allocation and transfer are two important engineering tasks. In fact, the assembly quality improvement and tolerances cost reduction are relied on optimal transfer and tolerance allocation while respecting the functions depend and manufacturing requirements. The traditional approaches reduce the tolerance values during the transfer of the design dimension on the manufacturing dimensions and expand the tolerance manufacturing cost as well. However, these approaches are unsuitable for a concurrent engineering context. This paper proposes a unique transfer approach of mechanism–dimension from the functional requirements to the manufacturing dimensions of parts. The traditional approaches for the transfer of mechanisms–dimensions in parts-dimensions are firstly presented. Then, a case study of the manufacturing dimensions specification based on Bourdet and Wade is detailed. The obtained results lead to avoid the tolerance reduction generated by the double dimensions transfer of traditional industrial approaches. A comparative study of allocated tolerances of manufacturing dimensions is presented for each approach. Therefore, the compared approaches classification is performed according to various criteria as the number of manufacturing dimensions, the values of the allocated tolerance and the calculated total cost based on the tolerances’ manufacturing cost and quality loss. In addition, the proposed method based on the unique transfer promotes the field of interactive engineering. In fact, the unique transfer requires the collaborative work and interactive exchange of expertise between different actors of the product development cycle.