Product Remanufacturability Assessment and Implementation Based on Design Features

Abstract

The design of a product can have substantial and significant impact on the decision-making processes across a product's life-cycle as well as its remanufacturability. A product CAD model provides a rich and useful source of information for remanufacturability assessment. This paper presents a product remanufacturability assessment model consisting of a set of numerical metrics, namely, disassembly accessibility, product complexity, disassemblability, and recoverability, based on the design features and information available in CAD models, e.g., bill of material, mating features, dimension and tolerance features, tools and accessories, etc. A software tool is developed for the implementation and integration of the proposed metrics based on CAD models as input. A case study using a SolidWorks model of an automotive part is presented and discussed to validate the proposed assessment approach.