Disassembly evaluation during the conceptual design phase to ensure a better valorisation of products at the end of life cycle

Abstract

In recent decades, the major preoccupation of industrialists has shifted towards the production of ecological products, given the actual environmental issues on the environment. to overcome this problem, several methodologies have been proposed, notably regarding the valorization of End-of-Life (EoL) products. The study of relevant literature indicates that in order to successfully recover EoL products, a design for an easily disassembled product should be considered from the early design stages. Therefore, the objective of the work reported in this paper is to support designers firstly to evaluate the disassembly from the beginning of the design process notably during the conceptual design, based on the following four criteria: type of disassembly tools, accessibility and operator’s posture during disassembly, disassembly time and the chosen EoL scenarios, and secondly to mark off the field of proposed concepts using the technique of reference concepts, which will help to delimite the scope of feasible alternatives and thus reject unfeasible alternatives from a disassembly point of view. An indicator was proposed to determine distance between a proposed concept and reference concepts, which represent the minimum acceptable. In order to prove the relevance of our approach, we applied it to an industrial case of three different concepts of a solar collector support. The results obtained allowed us to reduce the field of proposed solutions from three alternatives to two. Furthermore, the analysis of obtained results allowed us to extract some relevant recommendations to be made in the EoL strategy, in order to improve the disassembly performance of the rejected alternative. The evaluation results obtained after the modification of the EoL strategy allowed us to keep the alternative initially rejected after improving the criteria which had low scores compared to the reference concepts.