A Design Feature-based Approach for Product Remanufacturability Assessment and Analysis

Remanufacturing is a promising end-of-life (EoL) recovery strategy to achieve a close-loop product lifecycle in sustainable product development. Product design can have substantial impact on product remanufacturability and product EoL recovery strategy. Existing studies on design-based remanufacturability assessment are either based on design charts or consideration of simple embodiment design features. This paper presents a feature-based approach for remanufacturability assessment using comprehensive CAD information, e.g., bill-of-material, mating features, tolerance and dimension, etc. For each product component, a generic information model is defined to manage critical design features for remanufacturability assessment, which include both inherent attributes of the component and interrelations among connected components. The proposed approach assesses two critical aspects in remanufacturing, namely, part disassembly and recovery. Design evaluation based on the remanufacturing assessment and part EoL recovery strategy can provide feedback to enhance the product design to be more in line for sustainable manufacturing. A case study of an automotive part is presented to validate the proposed approach.