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

Abstract

Due 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 CADbased 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.Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

A Robust Design Research Landscape - Review on the Importance of Design Research for Achieving Product Robustness

“…In contrast, design research that would allow to move RD efforts to earlier development phases is a lot less recognized. Examples include methods for an early assessment of product robustness by means of suitable indicators (Eifler & Howard, 2018;Götz et al, 2020), network-topological metrics to describe the robustness of engineering systems (Haley et al, 2015), or the assessment of visual robustness (Forslund & Söderberg, 2010). However, while this paper aims at providing an overview of these research directions, it should be noted that the basic understanding as well as the most fundamental principles still originate from Taguchi's seminal work in the late 1950's.…”

Simultaneous Definition of Key Characteristics in Order to Facilitate Robust Design in Early Product Development Stages

“…The proposed approach is exemplarily applied to a simplified electric car window regulator to demonstrate the practical workflow. This academic case study is industry-oriented and offers various concept alternatives such as the cross-arm or dual rail cable mechanism enabling a useful robustness evaluation (Goetz et al, 2020). Moreover, the adequate simplicity of the system allows for good comprehensibility.…”

“…So, the exemplary evaluation in Figure 11 does not claim to be comprehensive and is primarily used for demonstrating the benefit of the proposed approach here. Based on the resulting indices, the principal solution dual rail cable window regulator is more robust than the crossarm window regulator (Goetz et al, 2020).…”

Tolerancing Informatics: Towards Automatic Tolerancing Information Processing in Geometrical Variations Management

“…The main goal of all product development activities is the provision of products that live up to the customer requirements. In this context, tolerancing for design or functional tolerancing can be defined as the set of all design activities that aim at translating such functional (customer) requirements (FR) into geometrical specifications of the single parts, which is relevant even at the early design stages [3,4]. More particularly, this involves tolerance specification, i.e., identifying required tolerance types on function-relevant features as well as suitable datum features, tolerance allocation (i.e., defining suitable values for these tolerance types), and tolerance analysis (i.e., the evaluation if the chosen tolerance types and values ensure the functional requirements) [5].…”