An important aspect in recycling and reuse for environmentally conscious manufacturing is disassembly. Although disassembly systems contain the same basic elements as assembly system, the disassembly problem differs significantly from the assembly problem due to the fact that the incoming disassembly product is not controlled. In addition, complete dismantling of products is not necessarily req...

Disassembly activities take place in various recovery operations including remanufacturing, recycling and disposal. The disassembly line is the best choice for automated disassembly of returned products. It is therefore important that the disassembly line be designed and balanced so that it works as efficiently as possible. The disassembly line balancing problem seeks a sequence which: is feasi...

Disassembly lines are the best way to disassemble products with similar components in large quantities. A disassembly line consists of a series of workstations. However, unlike their assembly counterpart, disassembly lines are affected by factors such as multiple component demand arrivals and end-of-life (EOL) product arrivals, uncertainty in EOL product and component demand arrivals and varyin...

Calcium ion induces rapid depolymerization of microtubules, and the mechanism of interaction of Ca2+ with cytoskeletal components may be metabolically significant. The sufficiency of an endwise depolymerization model for describing calcium-induced disassembly was demonstrated by three criteria: (a) correlation of the observed time course of disassembly with the initial polymer length distributi...

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...

Sampling-based path planning algorithms are powerful tools for computing disassembly motions. This paper presents a variant of the RRT algorithm particularly devised for the disassembly of objects with articulated parts. Configuration parameters generally play two different roles in this type of problems: some of them are essential for the disassembly task, while others only need to move if the...

Microtubules are long filamentous hollow cylinders whose surfaces form lattice structures of αβ-tubulin heterodimers. They perform multiple physiological roles in eukaryotic cells and are targets for therapeutic interventions. In our study, we carried out all-atom molecular dynamics simulations for arbitrarily long microtubules that have either GDP or GTP molecules in the E-site of β-tubulin. A...

A green design for assembly model is presented to integrate design evaluation and assembly and disassembly sequence planning by evaluating the three activities in one integrated model. For an assembled product, an assembly sequence planning model is required for assembling the product at the start of the product life cycle. A disassembly sequence planning model is needed for disassembling the p...