Copyright © 2012 Yi Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

When designing mechanical assemblies, assembly tolerance design is an important issue which must be seriously considered by designers. Assembly tolerances reflect functional requirements of assembling, which can be used to control assembling qualities and production costs. This paper proposes a new method for designing assembly tolerance networks of mechanical assemblies. The method establishes the assembly structure tree model of an assembly based on its product structure tree model. On this basis, assembly information model and assembly relation model are set up based on polychromatic sets (PS) theory. According to the two models, the systems of location relation equations and interference relation equations are established. Then, using methods of topologically related surfaces (TTRS) theory and variational geometric constraints (VGC) theory, three VGC reasoning matrices are constructed. According to corresponding relations between VGCs and assembly tolerance types, the reasoning matrices of tolerance types are also established by using contour matrices of PS. Finally, an exemplary product is used to construct its assembly tolerance networks and meanwhile to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.