Abstract
Parts with complex geometry have been divided into multiple parts due to manufacturing constraints of conventional manufacturing. However, since additive manufacturing (AM) is able to fabricate 3D objects in a layer-by-layer manner, design for AM has been researched to explore AM design benefits and alleviate manufacturing constraints of AM. To explore more AM design benefits, part consolidation has been researched for consolidating multiple parts into fewer number of parts at the manufacturing stage of product lifecycle. However, these studies have been less considered product recovery and maintenance at end-of-life stage. Consolidated parts for the manufacturing stage would not be beneficial at end-of-life stage and lead to unnecessary waste of materials during maintenance. Therefore, in this research, a design method is proposed to consolidate parts for considering maintenance and product recovery at the end-of-life stage by extending a modular identification method. Single part complexity index (SCCI) is introduced to measure part and interface complexities simultaneously. Parts with high SCCI values are grouped into modules that are candidates for part consolidation. Then the product disassembly complexity (PDC) can be used to measure disassembly complexity of a product before and after part consolidation. A case study is performed to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed design method. The proposed method contributes to guiding how to consolidate parts for enhancing product recovery.
Highlights
Studies of product design and development have helped engineers design products systematically.Product architecture has been determined to improve manufacturability of conventional manufacturing.A part with complex geometry in the product architecture divides into multiple parts for enhancing manufacturability due to limitations of conventional manufacturing
A part consolidation design method for Additive manufacturing (AM), which is extending previous to additive manufacturing, these multiple parts in a module can be considered as candidates for study [33,34], is proposed to group parts with high disassembly complexity into a module to enhance consolidation
Since we focus on deciding clear design boundary for part consolidation modules would be assessed to check whether it can be manufactured by an AM technology in terms of regardless of manufacturing constraints of AM, material types are considered in this research
Summary
Studies of product design and development have helped engineers design products systematically. To explore design benefits by AM, part consolidation design methods have received attractions from designers in terms of product redesign for improving performance, but are still developing to integrate multiple parts, that are designed by limitations of conventional manufacturing, as a single part by applying AM capabilities. In this study, we propose a design method to consolidate parts for product recovery at the end-of-life (EOL) stage by extending conventional module identification process. Since the PDC increases according to difficulty of disassembly of parts and the number of the parts and interfaces, the proposed design method aims to group parts with high disassembly difficulty into modules in order to minimize the disassembly complexity of the product at EOL stage. The identified modules are considered as design boundary for part consolidation that can be fabricated by AM, so that they contribute to improving product recovery processes.
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