Abstract
The design of longer-lasting products, such as domestic electric appliances, is a key-stone approach of the circular economy to reduce the use of non-reusable materials and the number of wastes to be managed at the end of the product’s life as well as to extend it. The manufacturing of modern electric appliances includes the incorporation of printed circuit boards (PCBs). PCBs provide mechanical support and electrically connect electrical or electronic components using conductive trackpads and other features etched from one or more sheet layers of copper laminated onto and/or between sheet layers of a non-conductive substrate. This paper proposes a PCB maintenance framework, fully compliant with the “Right to Repair” concept, considering the impact of their aging failures based on measurements made on them, as well as the repair and replacement costs of their components. Herein, we present an algorithm that assesses the problem of handling the repair and replacement cost corresponding to specific failures while ensuring that the total cost of repair does not exceed a predefined value. This is achieved through an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation which maximizes the benefit to the life expectancy, Li, of an appliance, constrained by a customer’s limited budget. The proposed methodology is tested with different PCBs and considers different types of appliances. More specifically, two cases concerning PCBs of washing and dishwasher machines are studied to examine the dependency of the solutions on the aging rate of their various components. The simulation results show that considering a medium budget, after 3 years, we can achieve a health benefit of 92.4% for a washing machine’s PCB, while for a dishwasher’s PCB, the health benefit drops to 86.3%.
Highlights
It is commonly recognized and accepted that population and quality of life increases, in industrialized countries, are projected to accelerate significantly over the two to three decades
The proposed method, implemented in an algorithm developed in a MATLAB environment, was applied and tested for the washing machine printed circuit boards (PCBs) described in the previous section
This article proposes a simple, flexible, and straightforward integer linear programming (ILP)-based method for optimizing a linear objective function associated with the components on a printed circuit board, subject to an inequality constraint while ensuring that the total cost of repair does not exceed a predefined value
Summary
It is commonly recognized and accepted that population and quality of life increases, in industrialized countries, are projected to accelerate significantly over the two to three decades. The advantage of this method is the ability to accelerate the normal aging process, allowing for the evaluation of electronic modules’ resistance to the adverse effects of specific climatic conditions such as heat, vibrations, radiations and humidity over a reasonable period of time This strategy is advantageous during the prototype phase when the newly developed equipment has not yet been utilized for a sufficient period of time to experience spontaneous failure at the end of its useful life. The ILP solves a system with the purpose of maximizing the “replacement ratio”, i.e., the gain of replacing several PCB parts, given their number and cost, the service expenses and the aging factor These tests were carried out on different appliances PCBs, washing and dishwasher machine PCBs, and the findings were used to perform repairs on these boards.
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