Current Research
Enabling Dimensional Control System at CGEC
Principal investigators:
Graduate students:
Ammar Ahmed - Automotive Systems Integration
Sponsor:
BMW Manufacturing Co. LLC
Brief abstract:
While engineering automotive parts, often a comprise must be found among various competing criteria. Crucial factors that affect the part design are e.g. pedestrian safety, crash performance, styling flexibility, durability, light-weight construction, noise, vibration, and harshness and manufacturability. All these criteria have impact on the part design, and also have an impact on the dimensional variations and alignment of that part. Installing the part easily on the car without using complex and expensive fixtures is desired, and in addition the gap plan must be met as well. The overall (visual) quality of the vehicle is often assessed by means of measuring the gaps and flushness of the various parts with respect to each other and addressing the tolerance distributions among multiple vehicle samples. During the vehicle development phase, virtual modeling will support the engineer to understand the process of toleranceing using computer simulation that predict the variations of the parts as part of the in the total assembly process. The virtual calculation in 3DCS (3-Dimension Control System) assisted by CAD software such as CATIA will help predict and optimize the overall manufacturing and assembly process by studying manufacturing process variations and assembly sequence and tolerances in a statistical manner.
Impact:
Everyone has a stake in product quality. Therefore, managing product quality risk is the key element to a successful Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process therefore the CGEC is establishing a permanent expertise for Dimensional Control.
Project schedule:
- Project start: August 19th , 2009
- Report on benchmarking completed: October 16nd , 2009
- DCS Tools operational at CGEC: October 16nd , 2009
- Course notes completed: November 27th, 2009
- Pilot project completed: February 26th, 2010
- Process manual completed: March 18th, 2010
- Functional validation completed: August 18th , 2010
