New flexible tolerancing strategy and development for complex structural aeronautical assemblies analysis in MECAmaster® software environment

In industry, the modelling of product / process assemblies is based on the concept of Geometrical Product Specification and Tolerancing analysis. One of the main hypotheses is the rigid workpiece principle. However, for some parts and assemblies, this assumption can be not acceptable. Thus, in this paper, the authors propose an approach to take into account the flexibility of the assemblies in the 3D tolerancing analysis. Designed on a hybridization between the tolerancing methods and finite element analysis, an original approach, based on a rigid / flexible linear model, is developed to build flexible stack-ups and fully integrated in 3DX®, MECAmaster® and Abaqus® software.