Development of Disassembly Support System for Mechanical Parts

Assembly/disassembly planning of mechanical products is one of the important manufacturing activities that must be supported by computers. Furthermore, recently, the design for disassemblability/recyclability becomes more important from the viewpoint of Life Cycle Assessment or Emission-Minimum. Therefore, we develop a system which can generate disassembly sequences and which can be applied to the design considering the disassemblability. First, methods to calculate possible motions of parts and to detect configurations where contact state transition occurs are introduced. Based on them, an algorithm for verifying disassemblability of parts is explained. Next, we propose a method for estimate the total number of feasible disassembly sequences without actually generating them. In order to reduce the number of disassembly sequences, precedence constraints such as the assembly feature are introduced. Finally, we implement a disassembly sequence generation system based on our proposed methods and demonstrate its efficiency.