Methodology of Product Disassemblability Analysis

Nowadays, most countries around the world have set legislations which are planned to force manufacturers to reuse, recycle, recover and remanufacture their products at the end of their life. However, before end-of-life products can be recycled, the end-of-life disassembly needs to be in place. This entails large amounts of capital expenditure. Most companies would not like to even consider disassembling and remanufacturing unless capital costs are justified and financial gains assured. Besides that, in general, the designers also do not have experience in disassembling and recycling to determine impact of various design aspects on difficulty and effort at the disassembly stage. Based on those, there is a strong need for a methodology to evaluate the disassemblability and determine the end-of-life options of the end-of-life products. It is expected to provide assistances in making decision at the early stage of product design. The end-of-life option determination and the disassemblability evaluation will show how economically efficient is it to disassemble a product and check the opportunity of a component to be recycled. This paper proposes a methodology to fulfill those needs. The proposed methodology is divided into five stages: (1) product definition; (2) end-of-life value calculation; (3) disassemblability evaluation; (4) recycling rate calculation; and (5) end-of-life value, disassemblability and recycling rate report.

Keywords: disassembly, disassemblability, disassembly seaquence, end-of-life, recycling