Optimal tolerance design for green manufacturing

Because tolerances have important influence on product cost and product quality, it has received many attentions in the past years. Many researchers have studied the tolerance optimal design considering the machining cost and product quality. But there are few researches considering environmental impact and energy consumption in tolerance design. In this paper, tolerances are optimized simultaneously considering machining cost, environmental impact cost, energy consumption cost and quality. Firstly, the relation between environmental impact cost and tolerance is established. Secondly, the relation between energy consumption cost and tolerance is established. In tolerance optimization design, the objective function is total cost including machining cost, environmental impact cost and energy consumption cost. The optimum solution of the model is obtained through analytic method. At last, an example is used to demonstrate the method proposed in this paper.