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Precision engineering

Field of engineering dealing with extremely low tolerances

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated March 3, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

Precision engineering is a subdiscipline of electrical engineering, software engineering, electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, and optical engineering concerned with designing machines, fixtures, and other structures that have exceptionally low tolerances, are repeatable, and are stable over time. These approaches have applications in machine tools, MEMS, NEMS, optoelectronics design, and many other fields.

Precision engineering is a branch of engineering that focuses on the design, development and manufacture of product with high levels of accuracy and repeatability.

It involves the use of advanced technologies and techniques to achieve tight tolerance and dimensional control in the manufacturing process.

01Overview

Professors Hiromu Nakazawa and Pat McKeown provide the following list of goals for precision engineering:

  1. Create a highly precise movement.
  2. Reduce the dispersion of the product's or part's function.
  3. Eliminate fitting and promote assembly, especially automatic assembly.
  4. Reduce the initial cost.
  5. Reduce the running cost.
  6. Extend the life span.
  7. Enable the design safety factor to be lowered.
  8. Improve interchangeability of components so that corresponding parts made by other factories or firms can be used in their place.
  9. Improve quality control through higher machine accuracy capabilities and hence reduce scrap, rework, and conventional inspection.
  10. Achieve a greater wear/fatigue life of components.
  11. Make functions independent of one another.
  12. Achieve greater miniaturization and packing densities.
  13. Achieve further advances in technology and the underlying sciences.

02Technical Societies

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Precision engineering”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Abbe error

Abbe error, named after Ernst Abbe, also called sine error, describes the magnification of angular error over distance. For example, when one measures a point that is 1 meter away at 90 degrees, an angular error of 1 degree corresponds to a positional error of over 1.745 cm, equivalent to a distance-measurement error of 1.745%.

Accuracy and precision

Accuracy and precision are measures of observational error; accuracy is how close a given set of measurements is to the true value and precision is how close the measurements are to each other. The International Organization for Standardization defines a related measure: trueness, "the closeness of agreement between the arithmetic mean of a large number of test results and the true or accepted reference value." While precision is a description of random errors (a measure of statistical variability), accuracy has two different definitions: More commonly, a description of systematic errors (a measure of statistical bias of a given measure of central tendency, such as the mean).

Flexure

A flexure is a flexible element engineered to be compliant in specific degrees of freedom. Flexures are a design feature used by design engineers (usually mechanical engineers) for providing adjustment or compliance in a design.