Assembly process simulation of toleranced products

Virtual assembly based on virtual reality provides a low-cost and rapid prototyping method for products' assembly, and tolerances have become a key technique of information integration in CAD/CAM. Integrating tolerances into virtual assembly is therefore a completely new approach. Many representations of assembly modelling have focused on capturing the mating constraints between components. Using the related theories, the expression of the constraints for assembly components and the method of extracting the constraints and mate feature matrix from the CAD software of Pro/Engineer are proposed, and finally, they are used to control and simulate the assembly process. A toleranced product modelling system based on the virtual reality is developed, and the use of tolerances is discussed by an example. In our research, we found that virtual assembly becomes more available by integrating tolerances into it. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.