Integration of robust and tolerance design in early stages of the product development process

Abstract

AbstractDue to the tightening of requirements and the increasing complexity of products, robust design becomes more and more important in the context of a straightforward product development. Although various robust design methods have been evolved to support the design of products that are less sensitive to variations, these methods are not sufficiently integrated into early stages of the product development process. This is mainly due to the lack of concrete product data necessary for robustness evaluation and tolerance specification. For this reason, it is still unclear to product development engineers when and how to apply existing approaches for enhancing the robustness of products. Therefore, this paper describes a holistic methodology that supports the designer in developing a robust product layout including an initial, validated tolerance specification based on the functional requirements. The proposed framework focuses on the close linkage of robust design activities with product data along the product development process and demonstrates the resulting benefits of an early consideration of variations and tolerances. In addition to the proper choice of robust product concepts and their corresponding spatial arrangement in the product structure, the approach allows a conceptual tolerance specification and the subsequent CAD-based analysis based on the preliminary design. Thus, the proposed approach aims to reduce iterations in the conventional tolerancing. To demonstrate the process, the methodology is applied to an electric window regulator.