The central seam, the vertical ‘line’ between doors, in the front view of a refrigerator must have its gap and flush within certain ranges to meet functional and aesthetic requirements. The conventional criteria for gap and flush control in the industry are to keep the gap and flush within certain ranges at each of various points along the seam. For aesthetics, however, the uniformity of the gap is also as important because a ‘tapered’ seam is negatively perceived by human eyes. This paper shows a case study of tolerance design for a refrigerator door system. It presents a step-by-step procedure, which consists of datum flow chain analysis, identification of assembly features, computer modeling of feature tolerances, assembly operations and measurements, tolerance simulation, and tolerance adjustments based on the simulation results. It is found that extra care may need to be used to satisfy the aesthetical criterion for gap uniformity.
