The Role of Error Budgeting in the Use of Structurally Integrated Features for Aerospace Assembly

The Jigless Aerospace Manufacture (JAM) project has been set up to investigate the significant technological and economic issues to enable the minimisation of product specific tooling in the design and assembly of large aerostructures.

As part of this on-going work, the use of error budgeting was explored to asses it suitability as a tool to enable the design of large aerostructures that would be easily assembled without recourse to expensive jigs and fixtures. This technique, which has been successfully used for the design of precision machines [1, 2], has the potential to allow the comparison of several concepts and configurations early in the design process and so help the selection process as well as highlighting areas where redesign should be considered at the detail design stage.

This paper detail how such a technique can be used during design of aerostructures, in particular when these structures employ integrated location and reference features to help the assembly process. An example is presented, which illustrates the main concepts of error budgeting.