Use of active disassembly technology to improve remanufacturing productivity: automotive application

Abstract

The development of sustainable production approaches is critical because of the link between environmental impact and manufacturing. Remanufacturing, a process of returning a used product to original performance specification from the customers’ perspectives with at least ‘as new’ product warranty, is a strategy to reduce manufacturing's environmental impacts whilst boosting profitability. Remanufacturing is poorly understood because of its relative novelty in research terms, for example, in comparison to conventional manufacturing. If considered during the early stages of a product's design, active disassembly (AD) can be used to enable the rapid, non-destructive, self-disassembly of products at end-of-life. AD reduces component damage and so facilitates remanufacture. This article explains a potential way forward to fuse ‘AD’ and ‘Design for Remanufacture’ in addressing the goals of sustainable manufacturing. An initial investigation of an automotive ‘electronic control unit’ is tested with a unique form of AD employing an ‘interstitial layer’. Future work is proposed.

Keywords:

• remanufacturing
• active disassembly
• productivity
• disassembly
• interstitial layer
• AD
• IL
• AD-IL
• ADSM
• DFRem

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Active Disassembly Research Ltd. (UK and Canada), Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Gaiker, Indumetal, ATP Industries Ltd., J&E Hall, Rolls-Royce Plc, Caterpillar Remanufactured Products and Ivor Searle Ltd.