Proposal of a Design Method for Dismantling Products with Split-Lines

An important process for the reuse and recycling of end of life products is their disassembly. In general, manual disassembly is a labor intensive and costly process. Especially, removing fasteners takes time and cost. For solving this problem, this paper proposes a design method for the partial dismantling of products with split-lines, which are added to the products at the design phase and enable to destruct the products along the line in order to extract target components. This method supports a designer in determining the location of split-lines by using the geometric model of the product. A case study shows that the dismantling of a LCD TV with split-lines reduces the number of manual operations needed for extracting target components.