A new quality appearance evaluation technique for automotive bodies including effect of flexible parts tolerances

ABSTRACT

Part tolerances have a crucial effect on the quality of products. In vehicle design, tolerance analysis is of central importance in quality appearance evaluation of automotive bodies and significantly taken into consideration by manufacturers in recent decades. This paper evaluates the surface quality of a car’s roof as one of the key quality characteristics in vehicle design. Compared to previous research in the area of quality appearance evaluation of automotive bodies, which are based on the assumption of part rigidity, the current research proposes to include part flexibilities in the analysis. The results of this study shows that input tolerances have a considerable effect on the surface quality of the final assembled product.

KEYWORDS:

• Part flexibilities
• quality appearance evaluation
• tolerance analysis