Project Details
[Return to Previous Page]Aluminum Tolerance Calculator Phase II
Company: The Aluminum Association, Inc.
Major(s):
Primary: CMPSC
Secondary: ME
Optional: CMPEN, ESC, IE, MATSE
Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO
Intellectual Property: YES
Introduction and Background: The Aluminum Association represents aluminum production and jobs in the United States, ranging from primary production to value added products to recycling, as well as suppliers to the industry. As the industry’s leading voice in Washington, D.C., the Association provides global standards, business intelligence, trade policy and expert knowledge to member companies and policy makers nationwide while being committed to advancing aluminum as the prime sustainable metal of choice around the world. The Association’s Standards department develops and maintains technical standards and publications that aid the producers and customers of primary aluminum and aluminum alloy semi-fabrications (semi-fabrication: processes that transform aluminum into a semi-finished intermediate products). One of our standards widely in use is Aluminum Standards & Data (AS&D), a standard that contains multiple chapters’ worth of tolerancing data for semi-fabricated aluminum products and is available in a U.S. customary units version and a metric units version. These products are used in numerous applications across a wide range of industries including aerospace, automotive, and structural engineering. Standardization often demands the use of intricate criteria and methods to ensure repeatability and reproducibility of prescribed instructions, and to reduce ambiguity in interpretation. Standardization is a means for providing clear technical information and we are exploring how novel methods could be used to make them more user-friendly to the target audience. We have used illustrative examples and explanatory videos to aid the users of our standards to commendable effect. We are now looking to combine modern software tools and to engage sharp engineering minds to develop efficient, interactive ways to make technical standards intuitive and easy to master Project Overview: The goal of this project is to continue the development of a digital resource that can help users accurately determine what tolerances apply to their products they make or purchase. As a starting point for this project, we have selected tolerances that apply to extruded wire, rod, bar and profiles fabricated using aluminum alloy-tempers (which are illustrated by a series of tables in AS&D Chapter 11). Tolerances that apply may include dimensions (e.g., thickness), straightness, flatness, angularity, twist, and more. Typically, for a specified thickness, width and/or diameter range, industry established tolerance limits for each of these parameters can be determined from these tables. Adding further complexity are multiple footnotes that define additional criteria that apply to each table and their elements within, making them an integral part of the tolerance calculation process. In Fall 2024, the Aluminum Calculator Tolerance team at PSU’s Learning Factory developed a prototype for table 11.2 that could accept property and dimension inputs from the user and calculate tolerance that apply for the section that took into account all the complexities of table 11.2 including its footnotes. This was achieved using PostegreSQL and PG Admin. The phase II team (Spring 2025) will inherit this prototype and will be tasked with expanding the resource to more tables of AS&D chapter 11. The Phase II team is encouraged to employ their creativity to refine and enhance the model developed by the prior team and to take it forward in their own direction, provided that it stays on track to achieve the original objective of serving as a high fidelity digital representation of the material in AS&D. The end result of this project is to create a helpful resource that could be packaged with the publication itself or made available separately on our website. A more advanced idea, or a stretch goal, would be to develop a program that can analyze an imported 2D CAD drawing of an extruded cross-section and subsequently recognize and recommend what tolerances apply for each of the geometric features of the cross-section. The project team is encouraged to come up with their own solutions while capitalizing on the material developed by their predecessors. The best deliverables would be both easily editable to update with revised values to keep up with revisions to the publications and easily expandable to include product forms other than extrusions that are covered therein. Project Deliverables: A web-based or standalone resource/program that can be used in conjunction with the tables in AS&D chapter 11 to interpret tolerances that apply to aluminum extrusions with both accuracy and efficiency. The resource/program should be capable of easy editing to accommodate revisions and easy expansion to include other AS&D chapters in the future.
