Variation Analysis of Compliant Assemblies: A Comparative Study of a Multi-Station Assembly

Variation analysis is a strategic task to control how dimensional and geometrical deviations, due to manufacturing processes, propagate during assembling phases. Over the years, several nu-merical methods have been proposed to model variational assemblies under the main hypothe-sis of rigid assembling parts. However, when parts deform during assembling operations, the flexibility of parts has to be considered into the model to better evaluate variations. A methodol-ogy - called SVA-FEA and proposed by the same authors, to do variation analysis of compliant assemblies - has been already tested recently with respect to the TAA module of CATIA® CAD system, for a single-station case. In the present paper, SVA-FEA is used to perform the comparative analysis with TAA for multi-station assemblies. The main differences have been outlined, highlighting the key characteris-tics of the two simulation tools.