Manufacturing Signature for Tolerance Analysis

Every manufacturing process leaves on the surface a signature, i.e., a systematic pattern that characterizes all the features machined with that process. The present work investigates the effects of considering the manufacturing signature in solving a tolerance stack-up function. A new variational model was developed that allows to deal with the form tolerance. It was used to solve a case study involving three parts with or without considering the correlation among the points of the same surface due to the manufacturing signature. A sensitivity analysis was developed by considering different values of the applied geometrical tolerances.