Enhancing Disassembly and Recycling Planning with Life Cycle Analysis

摘要

Today, resource optimization (energy and material) and environmental issues (O-zone, Acid rain, and global warming problems) in the life-cycle context are taken very seriously by both the general public and government agencies. Disassembly and recycling become an emphasis in most industrial countries due to the fact that the quantity of used products being discarded is increasing dramatic. It has been recognized that disassembly of used products is necessary in order to make recycling economically viable in the current state-of-the-art reprocessing technology. This new trend requires that environmental considerations be incorporated into design strategies. This research presents a graph-based heuristic approach to perform disassembly analysis for the end-of-life products which will integrate the ECO-Design concept. The components of a product and their assembly relationships that are from the bill of material (BOM) are used to split the graph into sub-graphs representing modular sub-assemblies. The life cycle inventory (LCI) is then applied to analyze disassembly trees, from which a disassembly sequence can be derived. The results of the analysis can be used by designers to evaluate the disassemblability and recyclability of products when they are designed.