Taking into account geometrical variation effect on product performance

International audienceDue to rapid development of technology and strict competition in the context of global and concurrent economy, the requirements of customers such as quality, reliability, sustainability and cost of products are more and more high and tight. Thus, satisfaction of those is an important key of product designers. However, the product designers work mainly on the nominal model of the product within a CAD/CAM system. These models can only represent nominal information about the product and have no ability to deal with various kinds of deviations during the product life cycle. These deviations can make the designed product not to meet fully the requirements of the customers. Thus, it is necessary to take into account the geometrical deviations to simulate the 'real' performances of the product. In this paper, we propose a method to integrate the geometrical deviations of the product into 'real' performance simulations. As a result, the product designers can generate the performance of the expected population of 'real' products. They can verify that the product they are designing will have 'real' performances satisfying the requirements of customers and users