Partial Disassembly Sequence Optimization of End-of-Life Products for Value Recovery

Author(s):  
Jeremy L. Rickli ◽  
Jaime A. Camelio ◽  
Giovannina Zapata

End-of-life product recovery operations require performance improvement to be viable in an industrial environment. A genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to optimize end-of-life partial disassembly decisions based on disassembly costs, revenues, and environmental impacts. Facilitating disassembly optimization with costs, revenues, and environmental impacts is necessary to enhance sustainable manufacturing through value recovery. End-of-life products may not warrant disassembly past a unique disassembly stage due to limited recovered component market demand and minimal material recovery value. Remanufacturing is introduced into disassembly sequence optimization in the proposed GA as an alternative to recycling, reuse, and disposal. The proposed GA’s performance is first verified through optimizing partial disassembly sequences considering costs and environmental impacts independently. Extension to a multi-objective case concerning costs, revenues, and impacts is achieved by specifying a new set of multi-objective crossover probabilities from independent crossover probabilities.

Author(s):  
Liang Cong ◽  
Fu Zhao ◽  
John W. Sutherland

Recovering valuable materials and components from end-of-life (EOL) products is an important means to mitigate the risk of disruption in the supply of virgin, critical materials. The economic viability of value recovery from EOL products is greatly affected by the dismantling process plan, i.e., the processes and the sequence used to recover components and materials. This paper presents an approach to find the optimal EOL strategy, which includes a method for automatic generation of disassembly model and making decisions on the best disassembly sequence, level and EOL options of components/parts. The approach also proposes to identify bottlenecks; degree of automation and destructive disassembly (dismantling) are considered as schemes to attenuate bottlenecks. The ultimate goal of the work is to provide recyclers with process plans to maximize their economic return and to help designers to evaluate product recyclability. A hard disk drive is used as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 096369351802700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehmet Önal ◽  
Gökdeniz Neşer

Glass reinforced polyester (GRP), as a thermoset polymer composites, dominates boat building industry with its several advantages such as high strength/weight ratio, cohesiveness, good resistance to environment. However, proper recovering and recycling of GRP boats is became a current environmental requirement that should be met by the related industry. In this study, to propose in a cost effective and environmentally friendly way, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been carried out for six scenarios include two moulding methods (namely Hand Lay-up Method, HLM and Vacuum Infusion Method, VIM) and three End-of-Life (EoL) alternatives(namely Extruding, Incineration and Landfill) for a recreational boat's GRP hulls. A case study from raw materials purchasing phase to disposal/recycling stages has been established taking 11 m length GRP boat hull as the functional unit. Analysis show that in the production phase, the impacts are mainly due to the use of energy (electricity), transport and raw material manufacture. Largest differences between the methods considered (HLM and VIM) can be observed in the factors of marine aquatic ecotoxicity and eutrophication while the closest ones are abiotic depletion, ozon layer depletion and photochemical oxidation. The environmental impact of VIM is much higher than HLM due to its higher energy consumption while vacuum infusion method has lower risk than hand lay-up method in terms of occupational health by using less raw material (resin) in a closed mold. In the comparison of the three EoL techniques, the mechanical way of recycling (granule extruding) shows better environmental impacts except terrestrial ecotoxicity, photochemical oxidation and acidification. Among the EoL alternatives, landfill has the highest environmental impacts except ‘global warming potential’ and ‘human toxicity’ which are the highest in extrusion. The main cause of the impacts of landfill is the transportation needs between the EoL boats and the licenced landfill site. Although it has the higher impact on human toxicity, incineration is the second cleaner alternative of EoL techniques considered in this study. In fact that the similar trend has been observed both in production and EoL phases of the boat. It is obvious that using much more renewable energy mix and greener transportation alternative can reduce the overall impact of the all phases considerably.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 131-140
Author(s):  
Federica Cappelletti ◽  
Marta Rossi ◽  
Michele Germani ◽  
Mohammad Shadman Hanif

AbstractDe-manufacturing and re-manufacturing are fundamental technical solutions to efficiently recover value from post-use products. Disassembly in one of the most complex activities in de-manufacturing because i) the more manual it is the higher is its cost, ii) disassembly times are variable due to uncertainty of conditions of products reaching their EoL, and iii) because it is necessary to know which components to disassemble to balance the cost of disassembly. The paper proposes a methodology that finds ways of applications: it can be applied at the design stage to detect space for product design improvements, and it also represents a baseline from organizations approaching de-manufacturing for the first time. The methodology consists of four main steps, in which firstly targets components are identified, according to their environmental impact; secondly their disassembly sequence is qualitatively evaluated, and successively it is quantitatively determined via disassembly times, predicting also the status of the component at their End of Life. The aim of the methodology is reached at the fourth phase when alternative, eco-friendlier End of Life strategies are proposed, verified, and chosen.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3469
Author(s):  
Ji Han ◽  
Pingfei Jiang ◽  
Peter R. N. Childs

Although products can contribute to ecosystems positively, they can cause negative environmental impacts throughout their life cycles, from obtaining raw material, production, and use, to end of life. It is reported that most negative environmental impacts are decided at early design phases, which suggests that the determination of product sustainability should be considered as early as possible, such as during the conceptual design stage, when it is still possible to modify the design concept. However, most of the existing concept evaluation methods or tools are focused on assessing the feasibility or creativity of the concepts generated, lacking the measurements of sustainability of concepts. The paper explores key factors related to sustainable design with regard to environmental impacts, and describes a set of objective measures of sustainable product design concept evaluation, namely, material, production, use, and end of life. The rationales of the four metrics are discussed, with corresponding measurements. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the metrics for evaluating product design concepts. The paper is the first study to explore the measurement of product design sustainability focusing on the conceptual design stage. It can be used as a guideline to measure the level of sustainability of product design concepts to support designers in developing sustainable products. Most significantly, it urges the considerations of sustainability design aspects at early design phases, and also provides a new research direction in concept evaluation regarding sustainability.


Sadhana ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bala Murali Gunji ◽  
Sai Krishna Pabba ◽  
Inder Raj Singh Rajaram ◽  
Paul Satwik Sorakayala ◽  
Arnav Dubey ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 950
Author(s):  
Xing Wang ◽  
Jianfeng Li ◽  
Xiujie Jia ◽  
Mingliang Ma ◽  
Yuan Ren

Remanufacturing is one of the most effective strategies to achieve sustainable manufacturing and restore the performance of end-of-life products. However, the lack of an effective cleaning method to clean carbonaceous deposits severely hampers the remanufacturing of end-of-life engines. To explore an appropriate cleaning method, it is necessary to first study the characterization of the carbonaceous deposits. A broad range of analyses including X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, thermogravimetric analysis, 1H-nuclear magnetic resonance study, X-ray diffraction analysis, and scanning electron microscopy were performed to conduct an in-depth characterization of the carbonaceous deposits. The results showed that a hybrid structure composed of organics and inorganics is the most distinguishing feature of the carbonaceous deposit in end-of-life engines. The inorganics form the skeleton on which organics get attached, thereby resulting in a strong adhesion of the deposit and increasing the difficulty of cleaning. Therefore, a method in which several cleaning forces can be simultaneously applied is more suitable for the present purpose. Molten salt cleaning was chosen to verify the feasibility of this proposal. This method was shown to have the potential to effectively clean the carbonaceous deposit. This finding could contribute towards promoting the effective remanufacturing of end-of-life engines.


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