Gometrically Robust Form Division

Paper in proceeding, 2007

By combining a Computer Aided Industrial Design (CAID) tool with a Computer Aided Tolerancing (CAT) tool, concurrent work between two related, but in industry often separated, areas with correlated product design features is facilitated. This paper presents an analysis tool that allows the creation and evaluation of split-lines in design concepts with respect to geometrical robustness and aesthetics. The aim with the analysis tool is to create products that are insensitive to manufacturing variation with the industrial design intent preserved. Since the split-lines are clues to detecting variation in assembled products, as well as part of the design language and the characterization of the product, it is important to work with these issues concurrently. The platform concept has been increasingly adopted in companies which, in many cases, provide an inheritance of the locating schemes, thus affecting the geometrical robustness of the concept, between models and sometimes even brands. This means that the parts creating an assembled product need to be designed in such a way that they satisfy the locating scheme configuration to achieve a geometrically robust solution. The functionality of the analysis tool has been demonstrated on an automobile body.