Identification and codification of principles for functional tolerance design

Tolerance design remains a key challenge in engineering design. The goal of the research presented in this article is to address this challenge through the identification and organization of novel tolerance design principles. These tolerance design principles are developed through a careful study of the literature, observation of commonly recurring tolerance solutions, and design strategies implied by the existing tolerance design literature. A key and novel contribution of the work presented in this article is that tolerance design is treated as a concurrent design problem. Tolerance design begins prior to assembly requirements and parameter design. Through the application of the principles presented here, tolerance design can be addressed through changes in product architecture and functionality. In addition, these principles provide a focus for developing new methodologies that will have high impact on engineering practice. These principles are formally organized to facilitate usage and extension. The usage and impact of these principles is shown through an example application to an original design problem. The design case study is an electric guitar pickup winder.