Evaluation of cylindricity using combinatorics

Several numerical methods have been developed for finding the minimum zone of a cylinder. This paper presents a combinatorial method termed the Minimum Shell for cylindricity evaluation. For a given set of measured data points, the method efficiently searches for the six points that determine the minimum zone of cylindricity. This method is self-contained, without the requirement of mathematical programming software support, and is equal to or superior to other methods of evaluating cylindricity in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and simplicity. Computational results are given.