Product performance simulation with geometric deviations throughout its life cycle

Abstract

Due to rapidly development of technology and strictly competition in the context of global and concurrent economy, the requirements of customers such as quality, reliability, sustainability and cost of products are more and more high and tightened. Thus satisfaction of those is an important key of product designers. However, the product designers work principally on the nominal model of the product or virtual manufacturing within a CAD/CAM system. These models can only represent the nominal information of product and have not ability to deal with various kinds of deviations, especially geometric deviations generated and accumulated throughout the product life cycle stage by material defects, manufacturing errors, assembling inaccuracy, etc. These deviations can make the designed product not to meet fully and systematically the requirements of the customers and the users. Thus, it is necessary to take the geometric deviations into account the "real" performance simulation. In this paper, we propose geometric deviation modelling suitable for all stages of the product life cycle, especially manufacturing and assembly stages and a method to integrate the geometric deviations of the product into the "real" performance simulation. As a result, the product designers can generate the performance of the population of "real" products. They can thus verify that the product they are designing would have "real" performances satisfying or dissatisfying the requirements of customers and users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.