ABSTRACT
Ultimately, the goal of precision engineering design is to create a process for which the outcomes are deterministic and controllable over a range of operation, with unpredictable deviations from a desired result being as small as is physically and economically possible. This book outlines concepts that might be considered good practice in precision engineering, concentrating on the basic principles and how to use them as part of the design, development and characterisation of the precision process in question. 2Many conceptual tools are discussed throughout the book and have been collected in this introductory chapter. Because these ideas are only briefly explained here, it is recommended that this be reviewed both before and after reading the rest of this book. To introduce this topic, this chapter discusses some general ideas of what constitutes precision engineering as a field of study and concludes with an outline of fundamental limits to precision.
