Reliability-Informed Economic and Energy Evaluation for Design for Remanufacturing: A Case Study on a Hydraulic Manifold

Design for Remanufacturing (DfRem) is an attractive approach for sustainable product development. Evaluation of DfRem strategies, from both economic and environmental perspectives, at an early design stage can allow the designers to make informed decisions when choosing the best design option. Studying the long-term implications of a particular design scenario requires quantifying the benefits of remanufacturing for multiple life cycles while considering the reliability of the product. In addition to comparing designs on a one-to-one basis, we find that including reliability provides a different insight into comparing design strategies. We present a reliability-informed cost and energy analysis framework that accounts for product reliability for multiple remanufacturing cycles within a certain warranty policy. The variation of reuse rate over successive remanufacturing cycles is formulated using a branched power-law model which provides probabilistic scenarios of reusing or replacing with new units. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, we use the case study of a hydraulic manifold, which is a component of a transmission used in some agricultural equipment, and use real-world field reliability data to quantify the transmission’s reliability. Three design improvement changes are proposed for the manifold and we quantify the costs and energy consumption associated with each of the design changes for multiple remanufacturing cycles.

A Review on the Lifecycle Strategies Enhancing Remanufacturing

Remanufacturing is a domain that has increasingly been exploited during recent years due to its numerous advantages and the increasing need for society to promote a circular economy leading to sustainability. Remanufacturing is one of the main end-of-life (EoL) options that can lead to a circular economy. There is therefore a strong need to prioritize this option over other available options at the end-of-life stage of a product because it is the only recovery option that maintains the same quality as that of a new product. This review focuses on the different lifecycle strategies that can help improve remanufacturing; in other words, the various strategies prior to, during or after the end-of-life of a product that can increase the chances of that product being remanufactured rather than being recycled or disposed of after its end-of-use. The emergence of the fourth industrial revolution, also known as industry 4.0 (I4.0), will help enhance data acquisition and sharing between different stages in the supply chain, as well boost smart remanufacturing techniques. This review examines how strategies like design for remanufacturing (DfRem), remaining useful life (RUL), product service system (PSS), closed-loop supply chain (CLSC), smart remanufacturing, EoL product collection and reverse logistics (RL) can enhance remanufacturing. We should bear in mind that not all products can be remanufactured, so other options are also considered. This review mainly focuses on products that can be remanufactured. For this review, we used 181 research papers from three databases; Science Direct, Web of Science and Scopus.

An integrated design method for remanufacturing process based on performance demand

Design for remanufacturing process (DFRP) plays a key role in implementing remanufacturing because it directly affects the performance recovery of the End-of-Life (EoL) product. Since the used parts have various failure forms and defects, these make it hard to rapidly generate the remanufacturing process scheme for satisfying the performance demand of the used product. Moreover, remanufacturing process parameters are prone to conflicts during the process of implementing remanufacturing, this leads to the failure of the remanufacturing process. For accurately generating remanufacturing scheme and solving the conflicts, an integrated design method for remanufacturing process based on performance demand is proposed, which can reuse the historical remanufacturing process data for generating the remanufacturing process scheme. Firstly, for accurately describing the performance demand, the Kansei Engineering (KE) and Quality Functional Development (QFD) are applied to analyze the performance demand data and map the demand to the engineering features. Then, Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) is applied to inversely generate the remanufacturing process scheme rapidly for satisfying the performance demand by reusing the historical remanufacturing process data. Meanwhile, Theory of Constraint (TOC) and TRIZ are used to identify the conflicts of the remanufacturing process and resolve the conflicts for optimizing the remanufacturing process scheme. Finally, DFRP of the saddle guideway is taken as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the result shows the design method can quickly and efficiently generate the remanufacturing process for the EoL guide rail.

Feasibility analysis of design for remanufacturing in bearing using hybrid fuzzy-topsis and taguchi optimization

The tremendous advancement in technology, productivity and improved standard of living has come at the cost of environmental deterioration, increased energy and raw material consumption. In this regard, remanufacturing is viable option to reduce energy usage, carbon footprint and raw material usage. In this manuscript, using computational intelligence techniques we try to determine the feasibility of remanufacturing in case of roller bearings. We collected used N308 bearings from 5 different Indian cities. Using Fuzzy-TOPSIS, we found that the roundness, surface roughness and weight play a vital role in design for remanufacturing of roller bearings. Change in diameter, change in thickness and change in width showed minimal influence. We also used Taguchi analysis to reassess the problem. The roundness of inner and outer race was found to be the most influential parameters in deciding the selection of bearing for remanufacturing. The results suggest the bearing designer to design the bearing in such a way that roundness of both races will be taken cared while manufacturing a bearing. However, using Taguchi the weight of the rollers was found to be of least influence. Overall, the predictions of Taguchi analysis were found to be similar to Fuzzy-TOPSIS analysis.