Producibility of High Precision Sintered Components - This research team led by R. German, A. Lehtihet, and R. Voight
is motivated by the need to make high precision press/sintered and powder injection molded parts commercially economical. They are focusing their attention on the dimensional and geometric tolerance constraints attached to the component design. The functional and assembly requirements of high precision sintered components are invariably translated, at the design stage, into a feasible set of dimensional and geometric tolerance constraints. The constraints, specify allowable accuracies that will not compromise the functional aptitude of the components.

The undergraduate students involved in this project can participate in the acquisition and evaluation of representative industrial data or the development of mathematical models that relate the dimensional data to the dimensional constraints and the processing methods. In the case of the former, the student will be involved in a range of research activities include:

• Identifying companies who produce high precision sintered components,
• Creating a design and deployment plan to acquire process parameters and dimensional/geometric tolerance data, and to benchmark prevailing engineering practices and process parameter selection for process control.

The latter project focus would include the following activities:

• Developing an approximate model and solutions for the probabilistic producibility of the three-dimensional position tolerance zones resulting from ASME Y14,5M-1994.
• Extending these models to more complex position tolerance zones, and applying the model to conduct sensitivity analysis.