Tolerance Analysis Supports Tolerance Assignment: The Industrial Case Study of Skillet

This work presents a method to support product design, since it shows how to use together tolerance assignment and analysis for choosing among different set of tolerances assigned to the same product. It starts from tolerance assignment that produces different sets of tolerances for the product components which are all acceptable from a functional point of view. It translates each assigned set of tolerances into one or more groups of tolerances that are recognized by the software used for tolerance analysis. Therefore, the software for tolerance analysis is applied to each group of tolerances by means of a Monte Carlo simulation approach. Finally, the obtained results are intersected or compounded to obtain the trend of product functional requirements that allows to identify the best set of tolerances assigned to the product components. The developed method was applied to a skillet, a platform of an industrial plant that is made of five parts connected by screws. The obtained results show how the developed new method is a valid tool to support design for industrial application.