Abstract
It is the basic requirement of design process of parts assembly to specify geometric dimensions and tolerances of product characteristics. Among them, tolerance stack analysis is one of the important methods to specify tolerance zone. Tolerance stack analysis is to calculate gap using tolerances which includes geometric and coordinate dimensions. In this study, we suggested more general method called the virtual method to analyze tolerance stack. In virtual method, tolerance zone is formed by combination of dimensional tolerance, geometric tolerance and bonus tolerance. Also tolerance zone is classified by virtual boundary condition and resultant boundary condition. So gap can be defined by combination of virtual boundary and/or resultant boundary. Several examples are used to show the effectiveness of new method comparing to other methods.