Comparison among different tools for tolerance analysis of rigid assemblies

Tolerance analysis is an important task to design and to manufacture high-precision mechanical assemblies; it has received considerable attention in the literature. Actually there are some different tools used or proposed by the literature to make the tolerance analysis of an assembly, but no one of them is completely and univocally accepted. A comparison between a Computer Aided Tolerancing (CAT) tool for geometry assurance and some methods proposed in the literature is discussed in this work. Therefore, the aim of this work is to solve by a CAT software five case studies that were already solved by different methods. The potentialities and the limits of using a CAT technique for geometry assurance are highlighted.