Determination of True Dimensional Quality and Build Errors Using Coordinate Measurement Data

Abstract

For manufacturing personnel there exist two major tasks: determination of the quality of the build, and locating build errors if the quality is inferior. To serve this purpose a coordinate measuring machine is employed to determine the actual locations of designated material points. Depending on the measuring coordinate frame chosen, the initial raw data, unfortunately, do not impartially represent the true deviations of all the measurement points. This paper shows a technique to overcome this inevitable drawback embedded in the CMMs and determine if the build has acceptable quality under specified tolerances. Also presented in this paper is a method to quantify the quality of the measurement points for easy identification of build errors. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the technique.