Predicting the variation in the final assembly given the variation in the parts and tooling is of interest to automobile and aerospace industries alike. I will present a simple model of welding and clamping of beams that demonstrates that the order in which the clamps and welds are imposed influences the final shape of the assembly. Additionally, using statistical methods we show that clamping and welding from the inside out leads to a smaller standard deviation in the result (as measured by the displacement of the right end of the beams) in response to normal distributions of variations parts and welding.

Connecting Women in Mathematical Sciences to Industry

2000-2001 Program: Mathematics in Multimedia