CAREER: Specification and Analysis of Geometric Variability in Engineering Design

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)proposes to support an integrated program of research and teaching that will both strengthen professional engineering design activity and enhance engineering education by broadening the understanding of the role of variation control as a fundamental part of the design process. The educational component of this award promotes the explicit recognition of process and product variability as a common thread through the design curriculum. This will prepare our students for their senior design capstone project and beyond, where they must not only draw on the decision-making skills developed in the first three years, but must also deal with the reality of specifying parts unambiguously so that they can be manufactured by others. Research in the role of geometric variation, especially as it propagates through assemblies, will complement naturally the educational efforts described above. This research focuses on advancing a more thorough and fundamental understanding of the "physics of mechanical assembly" and its application through the extension of current modeling and analysis methods. The basis for this research is a novel mathematical assembly model, GapSpace, that represents both contact and clearance conditions in an assembly. The broader impacts of these activities will include: (a) involvement of engineering and non-engineering students in the process of modeling and analyzing geometric variation, (b) collaboration with other educational institutions - universities, community colleges, and institutions serving underrepresented groups - in the dissemination of teaching techniques and materials related to geometric tolerancing, (c) outreach to K-12 students and teachers in "science summer camp" programs, (d) continued participation in the development of National Standards that reflect accurately the current state of knowledge in geometric control and measurement, and (e) partnering with industry to validate research results and facilitate the transfer of new analysis methods to practitioners.