Variable Tolerancing

The Variable Tolerancing provides you ability to specify different tolerance for different zone or nominal points of airfoil section and evaluate it accordingly.

PC-DMIS Blade offers variable tolerancing for these calculations:

How to apply Variable Tolerancing

To apply variable tolerancing, select one of the above calculations in creation of the Flavor file.

Flavor File dialog box

To define the method, click Define.

Select the method to define variable tolerance:

NOMFILE – Nominal File

The Nominal file needs to be modified to add the plus tolerance or minus tolerance for each point. The form of each point in the Nominal file will be X, Y, Z, I, J, K, Minus Tol, Plus Tol. PC-DMIS Blade provides nominal editor to define tolerances for each point in nominal file.

VARFILE - Variable Tolerance File (.VTL)

You need to define two curves for this method. The first curve defines the upper limit of tolerance and second curve defines the lower limit of tolerance. The upper limit and lower limit tolerances curves are defined as sets of 2D points (X,Y). PC-DMIS Blade evaluates if measured curve is within the boundary of upper limit and lower limit curves.

The definition of tolerance curve for each section are stored in Variable tolerance file – VARFILE. The name of the Variable Tolerance file should be the same as the Nominal file but .VTL as the extension. For example, if the name of the Nominal file is MyBlade.NOM, then the name of the Variable Tolerance file should be MyBlade.VTL. Both files should be in the same folder. The order of upper tolerance curve and lower tolerance curve in variable tolerance file is not important.

You can use any text editor to create such a curve.

File Format

The format of each section in the file looks similar to this:

SECTION SECTNAME N1 N2 (N1 and N2 are the number of points that define the two tolerance curves)

X Y (point 1 of first tolerance curve)

X Y (point 2 of first tolerance curve)

X Y (point N1 of first tolerance curve)

X Y (point 1 of second tolerance curve)

X Y (point 2 of second tolerance curve)

X Y (point N2 of second tolerance curve)

Example

SECTION A-A 800 800

-3.9853,2.1526

-4.1275,2.0513

-4.2696,1.9497

-4.4115,1.8479

-4.5531,1.7458

-4.6946,1.6435

-4.8359,1.5409

-4.9771,1.4380

 

VARIABLE – Variable in Tolerance file

You can add the keywords to define tolerance zone in the Edit Tolerance (.tol) file. You can use any text editor such as Notepad.

Example

LE_VARTOL -0.008 0.008

MID_VARTOL -0.010 0.010

TE_VARTOL -0.012 0.012

CHORD_VARTOL -0.060 0.060

Diagram of Variable Tolerancing Scheme

Variable tolerancing scheme

Variable tolerancing scheme

 

More:

Tolerance File

Tolerance File Keywords

Exclusion Zones for BestFit