Innovate at new cost and performance levels
Cost Pressure from Tight Tolerances
Automotive programs face relentless cost pressure. Yet many designs rely on overly tight tolerances to guarantee performance. Overconstraints in mechanical systems create unnecessary interfaces, multiplying the number of needed tolerance stacks and forcing expensive precision. The combination of overconstraints and tight tolerances drive up complexity and lead to slow assembly. The result:
• Higher production costs
• Longer lead times
• Reduced flexibility for innovation
Without a structured approach to creating tolerance stacks and allocating tolerances, teams often default to conservative limits that inflate cost without improving reliability.
Overconstraints Create Hidden Complexity
Every additional constraint adds coupling between parts. More interfaces mean more tolerance stacks, which require tighter specifications to maintain function. This complexity cascades through manufacturing and assembly, increasing cost and risk.
Traditional design methods rarely question these constraints early, so problems surface late when changes are expensive. The solution is twofold: remove unnecessary overconstraints and allocate tolerances based on functional requirements, not arbitrary limits. Simplifying tolerance stacks through robust design reduces scrap, accelerates assembly and reduces overall cost both in development and production while maintaining high quality.
Smart Design through Robust Principles
RD8 applies all Robust Design disciplines, including kinematics and tolerance analysis right from the concept stage. By improving the kinematic score, we eliminate overconstraints and ensure predictable force paths.
Functional tolerance allocation replaces guesswork with data-driven decisions, improving both cost and performance. This approach simplifies interfaces, reduces tight specs, and creates designs that are easier to manufacture and assemble.
The outcome: lower cost, higher quality, and faster development without compromising reliability.
Case Study: Reinventing the Oil pump
The RD8 Engineering Design Tool is used to develop a oil pump for electric vehicles. Existing know-how of combustion vehicles cannot be transferred 1:1 and requires new ideas and innovations.
Oil Pump Development
For decades, oil pumps have followed the same design principles with incremental improvements.
But as the automotive industry shifts towards electrification and efficiency targets, these legacy designs no longer meet new requirements. Higher integration, reduced energy losses, and compact packaging demand a fundamental redesign.The challenge: unknowns in kinematics and force paths arise because the new design is not based on decades of experience.
These uncertainties cannot be solved by trial and error late in development. RD8’s approach identifies these risks early by mapping functional tolerance stacks and analyzing force paths from the concept stage. This enables engineers to validate robustness before tooling and deliver innovative solutions without prolonging the time to market.
By uncovering hidden variation issues early, RD8 ensures confidence in performance and cost targets, even when venturing into unfamiliar design territory.
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