Disassembly sequence and cost analysis for electromechanical products

For companies, the improvement of the recyclability performance of their newly designed products is becoming an integral part of product development process. The concept of environmental conscious design (ECD) has been adopted to assist the environmental performance of the products at the early stage of designing. This new trend requires that the design strategies need to be modi"ed by integrating the environmental constraints. This paper provides the disassembly sequence and cost analysis for the electromechanical products during the design stage. The disassembly planning is divided into four stages: geometric assembly representation, cut-vertex search analysis, disassembly precedence matrix analysis, and disassembly sequences and plan generation. The disassembly cost is categorized into three types: target disassembly, full disassembly, and optimal disassembly. The result of this approach shows that the electromechanical products can be disassembled systematically and economically. ( 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.