Abstract
AbstractBoth economic and environmental aspects significantly influence the design process since the early phases of preliminary design. The total Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the End of Life (EoL) of products have to be defined in the early design phases too but, for industrial products that are not feasible to automatic production, they are hard issues. However, the EoL of products can be assessed by evaluating the disassembly of joints assembling the product, even when the production process is subject to an important contribute of workmanship. In this paper, a useful method is proposed to analyze the disassembly plant of products, in order to optimize the design process in the early preliminary phases. The method quantitatively evaluates a Disassembly Index that describes the attitude of a product to be disassembled. A case study describes the disassembly attitude of structural subassemblies of a sailboat. In order to test the applicability of the model described to both manual and automated disass...
Highlights
The Design for Disassembly (DfD) is part of the broader concept Design for X (DfX), which focused on each life cycle’s step of the product development, in order to improve the quality and reduce the cost and the time of implementation of a project.PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENTThe paper proposed a method that can guide the designer in the early stages of product design
The results about the DI evaluation in both cases of the handcrafted product faced to a mass product highlighted some important conclusions:
This model is easy to employ because is based on the definition of only three parameters, describing the number of materials, the time necessary to disassembly operations and the integrity of parts after their disassembly, that in some cases are quantified by simple considerations on facts and, in other cases, by the use of a mathematical expression to calculate the time necessary to disassemble a joint;the model demonstrated good sensitiveness to the variation of parameters k, z, h, that have been hypothesized in two parallel simulations for the same product, depending on the manufacturing processes described;
Summary
The Design for Disassembly (DfD) is part of the broader concept Design for X (DfX), which focused on each life cycle’s step of the product development, in order to improve the quality and reduce the cost and the time of implementation of a project. The evaluation method was based on the filling of an evaluation chart that described the disassembly process by means of some entries such as the quantity, the task types and repetitions, the required tools to disassemble parts, the difficulty rating to the disassembly process It evaluated the ease of disassembly in terms of the design effectiveness and the disassembly time. They are very simple operations that do not require any contribute of workmanship or rather they can be automatized and completed in few minutes This entails that the values for k have been calculated assuming the disassembly time for each junction varying from 1 to 10 min at most, depending on the operation considered. The computation of the Disassembly Index for the Computer CPU, in the above-described conditions, gives back a value of 0.86
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