A computer aided tolerancing tool I: Tolerance specification

In current tolerancing practice, designers have to manually specify tolerances: either on a drawing or in a CAD system. Different designers will possibly arrive at different tolerance specifications for the same nominal geometry. The paper demonstrates that this situation can be avoided in the case of functional tolerancing with a focus on the geometry relevant for functioning. Under this restriction, the specification of too tight or too many tolerances can also be avoided. The paper describes a tool for functional tolerance specification which supports the user in automatically proposing geometric tolerance types where the user only has to give in the tolerance values. Apart from this semi-automatic tolerance type specification, manual specification is still possible.