Incoming environmental legislation is expected to impose recycling activities on industrial and consumer product manufacturers. Disassembly of used products is needed in order to make recycling economically viable in the current state of the art of reprocessing technology, thus avoiding the future high disposal costs. This paper gives an overview of disassembly research at universities, research centers and industrial companies, pointing out ongoing topics and trends for future activities. Among them, major attention has been paid to basic technological development, product design (design for disassembly), process design (selection of disassembly strategy and automation level) and system design (configuration of manual and automated disassembly facilities, design of disassembly tools). It is also shown how the emerging life cycle concept can be fully exploited to develop suitable ways of dealing with information related to environmental protection and resource optimization. A result of the survey is that further development on disassembly of existing products (technology, planning at process and system level) is needed to allow future products to be designed with recycling considerations in mind.
A key issue in product life cycle: disassembly
IOVANE, FRANCESCO;ARMILLOTTA, ANTONIO;
1993-01-01
Abstract
Incoming environmental legislation is expected to impose recycling activities on industrial and consumer product manufacturers. Disassembly of used products is needed in order to make recycling economically viable in the current state of the art of reprocessing technology, thus avoiding the future high disposal costs. This paper gives an overview of disassembly research at universities, research centers and industrial companies, pointing out ongoing topics and trends for future activities. Among them, major attention has been paid to basic technological development, product design (design for disassembly), process design (selection of disassembly strategy and automation level) and system design (configuration of manual and automated disassembly facilities, design of disassembly tools). It is also shown how the emerging life cycle concept can be fully exploited to develop suitable ways of dealing with information related to environmental protection and resource optimization. A result of the survey is that further development on disassembly of existing products (technology, planning at process and system level) is needed to allow future products to be designed with recycling considerations in mind.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
