Parallel disassembly approach with recycling rate calculation of industrial products

Abstract

Design activity is the initial step in manufacturing. In smart factory, these activities should be interconnected. The final cost of a product is affected by decisions which are made in these activities. Since 1980, Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) approaches has been developed to guide planners to produce products which are easy to fabricate and assemble. Designing products for recyclability is constrained by environmental and economic targets. Numerous Design for Assembly (DFA) laws and parameters can be employed to measure the recyclability index of product designs. Parallel assembly and disassembly techniques using human and robot collaboration can also improve the design quality by choosing the shorter way to completely dismantle the product or to dismantle wear parts. The implementation of these approaches has created a revolution in today’s industry, by many improvements as reduce product cost, shorter time to market, better quality, and few suppliers of standard parts. In this paper, a novel method to parallel dismantle a product is presented. To improve the design quality of the product, a set of assessment metrics were considered as recyclability for reusing aspect, total disassembly time of the product, parallelism aspect, and design efficiency. A comparative example is used to demonstrate the added value of the proposed approach.