Automated analysis of product disassembly to determine environmental impact

An Ontology Approach to Product Disassembly

In recent years, growing ecological concern has prompted for ‘design for environment’. One way to achieve this is to design products that are easy to disassemble, because this improves the ability to reuse or recycle parts of a product. This paper presents a computational theory for product modeling and reasoning about product disassembly. This theory, implemented in the PROMOD system, is based...

Structure representation for concurrent analysis of product assembly and disassembly

This paper presents a simple and novel structure representation supporting the assembly and disassembly planning of electromechanical products. The proposed Relationship Matrix derived from a directed graph represents both the information of the component connectivity and the layout precedence of functional elements. The feasible assembly and disassembly sequences and the minimum service steps ...

The environmental footprint: A method to determine the environmental impact of agricultural production

Design for Product Embedded Disassembly

This paper presents a computational method for designing assemblies with a built-in disassembly pathway that maximizes the profit of disassembly while satisfying regulatory requirements for component retrieval. Given component revenues and components to be retrieved, the method simultaneously determines the spatial configurations of components and locator features on the components, such that t...

Reducing Environmental Impact through Systematic Product Evolution1

Whether propelled by a concern for the environment, increasingly stiff legislation, or higher disposal costs, companies are trying to reduce the environmental impacts of their products. At the same time, designers are forced to achieve the same, or more stringent, design constraints in less time, balancing the need to get a product out the door with the desire to improve the product’s functiona...