Engineering tolerance
Engineering tolerance is the permissible limit or limits of variation in:
Not to be confused with Factor of safety.Dimensions, properties, or conditions may have some variation without significantly affecting functioning of systems, machines, structures, etc. A variation beyond the tolerance (for example, a temperature that is too hot or too cold) is said to be noncompliant, rejected, or exceeding the tolerance.
Considerations when setting tolerances[edit]
A primary concern is to determine how wide the tolerances may be without affecting other factors or the outcome of a process. This can be by the use of scientific principles, engineering knowledge, and professional experience. Experimental investigation is very useful to investigate the effects of tolerances: Design of experiments, formal engineering evaluations, etc.
A good set of engineering tolerances in a specification, by itself, does not imply that compliance with those tolerances will be achieved. Actual production of any product (or operation of any system) involves some inherent variation of input and output. Measurement error and statistical uncertainty are also present in all measurements. With a normal distribution, the tails of measured values may extend well beyond plus and minus three standard deviations from the process average. Appreciable portions of one (or both) tails might extend beyond the specified tolerance.
The process capability of systems, materials, and products needs to be compatible with the specified engineering tolerances. Process controls must be in place and an effective quality management system, such as Total Quality Management, needs to keep actual production within the desired tolerances. A process capability index is used to indicate the relationship between tolerances and actual measured production.
The choice of tolerances is also affected by the intended statistical sampling plan and its characteristics such as the Acceptable Quality Level. This relates to the question of whether tolerances must be extremely rigid (high confidence in 100% conformance) or whether some small percentage of being out-of-tolerance may sometimes be acceptable.
An alternative view of tolerances[edit]
Genichi Taguchi and others have suggested that traditional two-sided tolerancing is analogous to "goal posts" in a football game: It implies that all data within those tolerances are equally acceptable. The alternative is that the best product has a measurement which is precisely on target. There is an increasing loss which is a function of the deviation or variability from the target value of any design parameter. The greater the deviation from target, the greater is the loss. This is described as the Taguchi loss function or quality loss function, and it is the key principle of an alternative system called inertial tolerancing.
Research and development work conducted by M. Pillet and colleagues[1] at the Savoy University has resulted in industry-specific adoption.[2] Recently the publishing of the French standard NFX 04-008 has allowed further consideration by the manufacturing community.
Electrical component tolerance[edit]
An electrical specification might call for a resistor with a nominal value of 100 Ω (ohms), but will also state a tolerance such as "±1%". This means that any resistor with a value in the range 99–101 Ω is acceptable. For critical components, one might specify that the actual resistance must remain within tolerance within a specified temperature range, over a specified lifetime, and so on.
Many commercially available resistors and capacitors of standard types, and some small inductors, are often marked with coloured bands to indicate their value and the tolerance. High-precision components of non-standard values may have numerical information printed on them.
Low tolerance means only a small deviation from the components given value, when new, under normal operating conditions and at room temperature. Higher tolerance means the component will have a wider range of possible values.
Difference between allowance and tolerance[edit]
The terms are often confused but sometimes a difference is maintained. See Allowance (engineering) § Confounding of the engineering concepts of allowance and tolerance.