Computer-Aided Design for Product De- and Remanufacture
Abstract Increasingly, designers are asked to consider additional types of requirements, including the environmental impact of their designs during the product’s lifetime and after its useful life. Two of these types of requirements are investigated in this paper. Demanufacturing is the process of dismantling a product and preparing for the disposal or recycling of components, modules, or materials. Product reuse retains a greater portion its value and often requires remanufacturing, the refurbishment of a product or product modules. Assessments of a product’s ease of de- and remanufacture are often desirable at various stages during the design process. In this paper, requirements for CAD representations to support de- and remanufacture assessments are identified. Information requirements are classified into categories according to the difficulty in extracting the information from assembly-based CAD representations. Information not obtainable from CAD representations is noted. Methods for querying CAD systems to extract significant amounts of this information are presented. These methods have been incorporated into the prototypical CAD system CODA. This work is applied to the design for de- and remanufacture of an automotive instrument cluster. It is shown that feasible disassembly sequences can be generated, ideal parts can be recognized, disassembly times can be reliably estimated, and input can be generated for spreadsheet-based assessment tools.