A concise framework for disassemblability metrics

Abstract

With growing interest in the recovery of materials and subassemblies from consumer products at the end of their useful life, there is a need to develop decision-making methodologies that determine how to maximize the environmental benefits of end-of-life processing while minimizing recovery costs. Design for Environment (DfE) emerged as the common design framework that encompasses current and future approaches to the environmental management of industrial products. Within the context of DfE, disassembly appears to be the most common procedure of current end-of-life treatment methods. Consequently quantitative design evaluation from the disassembly perspective has received special attention in the literature and a conceptual sub-framework known as Design for Disassembly (DfD) has been developed for defining disassembly goals, for guaranteeing their transformation to product design characteristics and for assessing the success of the entire design process. Unfortunately adequate metrics for the disassembly evaluation at the design stage are still lacking. This paper presents a set of requirements for novel disassemblability metrics for specific product families.