A virtual prototyping approach to product disassembly reasoning

An important aspect of Design for the Life Cycle is assessing the disassemblability of products. After an artifact has completed its useful life, it must be disassembled then recycled, remanufactured or scrapped. Disassemblability of a product can be evaluated by performing disassembly activities on prototypes. Virtual prototyping (VP) is an alternative to hardware prototyping in which analysis of designs can be done without manufacturing physical samples. In recent years, disassembly processes have been generated either by using interactive or automated approaches, but these approaches have limitations. Interactive approaches require extensive user input usually in the form of answering questions, whereas automated approaches can only be used to generate disassembly processes for products with simple component configuration and geometry. In this paper automated and interactive techniques are combined, using VP, to generate complete disassembly processes of a product design. To support generation of disassembly processes of a product, a virtual environment and VP method were developed that will Support disassembly activities performed by a designer. The product model of the virtual prototype is generated from the CAD model. The disassembly process model for the prototype is generated using automated reasoning techniques and is completed by interactively disassembling the product in the virtual environment. Extensions to automatic reasoning techniques to compute ranges of feasible directions of component removal were developed to facilitate the generation of the disassembly process. A scheme to represent the disassembly process for disassemblability evaluation was developed and implemented. In this paper a Chrysler LHS center console has been used to illustrate our approach of generating disassembly processes via VP. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.