Practical implications in tolerance analysis of sheet metal assemblies:: Experiences from an automotive application

Over the past years, several approaches for variation simulation of sheet metal assemblies have been presented. However, there are few reports on validation of the methods compared to real production inspection data. Often, the validation consists of comparing the simulation result from different methods against each other and not to real inspection data. In practice, variation simulation methods are difficult to use due to practical implications. This paper illustrates some of the implications and modeling aspects related to sheet metal assembly variation analysis. The tolerance analysis and validation is done by analyzing a real sheet metal assembly with the production inspection data that is used to monitor the process. The aim is to analyze how consistent the result from the tolerance analysis is with the inspection data. Finally, some modeling aspects and techniques will be discussed.