mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, ...
, an envelope is a solid representing all positions which may be occupied by an object during its normal range of motion.
Another (
jargon
Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a partic ...
) word for this is a "flop".
Wheel envelope
In
automobile design
Automotive design is the process of developing the appearance (and to some extent the ergonomics) of motor vehicles - including automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, buses, coaches, and vans.
The functional design and development of a modern mot ...
, a wheel envelope may be used to model all positions a wheel and
tire
A tire (American English) or tyre (British English) is a ring-shaped component that surrounds a wheel's rim to transfer a vehicle's load from the axle through the wheel to the ground and to provide traction on the surface over which t ...
combo may be expected to occupy during driving. This will take into account the maximum jounce and rebound allowed by the suspension system and the maximum turn and tilt allowed by the steering mechanism. Minimum and maximum tire inflation pressures and wear conditions may also be considered when generating the envelope.
This envelope is then compared with the wheel housing and other components in the area to perform an interference/collision analysis. The results of this analysis tell the engineers whether that wheel/tire combo will strike the housing and components under normal driving conditions. If so, either a redesign is in order, or that wheel/tire combo will not be recommended.
A different wheel envelope must be generated for each wheel/tire combo for which the vehicle is rated. Much of this analysis is done using CAD/
CAE CAE may refer to:
Organisations Aviation
* CAE Aviation, a Luxembourgian aviation services company
* CAE Inc. (formerly Canadian Aviation Electronics), a Canadian manufacturer of simulation technologies and training provider
* Régional Compagnie A ...
systems running on computers. Of course, high speed collisions, during an accident, are not considered "normal driving conditions", so the wheel and tire may very well contact other parts of the vehicle at that time.
Robot's working envelope
In robotics, the working envelope or work area is the volume of working or reaching space. Some factors of a robot's design (configurations, axes or
degrees of freedom
Degrees of freedom (often abbreviated df or DOF) refers to the number of independent variables or parameters of a thermodynamic system. In various scientific fields, the word "freedom" is used to describe the limits to which physical movement or ...