Roughness and materials in concurrent engineering systems

The choice of a manufacturing process in the design process takes into account many parameters. The surface roughness, the dimensional tolerance and the material of a mechanical part are essential data, influencing the behaviour and the mechanism lifetime. The algorithm presented in this paper allows the integration of surface quality into a CAD/CAM system, via models to predict surface roughness. Different theoretical and empirical roughness models are presented. They allow to estimate the manufacturing parameters.