A mathematical formulation for assessing disassembly plans based on energy consumption, disassembly time and recyclability for a sustainable design

Carbon footprint in industry represents a major challenge toward limiting global warming and staying in line with governments’ policies regarding CO2 emissions. Therefore, urgent actions are required to comply with such requirements, consequently depleting carbon emissions. Reducing the overall energy consumption throughout a product's lifecycle is a promising strategy. However, the eco-design of disassembly process remains a research gap, necessitating the establishment of a decision metrics-based design guideline. To address this gap, this paper is implementing a new approach for evaluating the system’s design based on a set of metrics i.e. energy consumption, disassembly time, design efficiency, disassembly quality, and recyclability. These metrics are assessed in assembly lines for mechatronic equipment to gauge energy waste. The objective is to balance the disassembly lines through depleting the energy consumption. The trade-off between recovery and destruction of parts to be recycled is discussed. The proposed methodology starts with the extraction of necessary Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) data used to generate the feasible and optimal disassembly sequence. It is then converted to a workstation planning which will be optimized using power consumption criterion. The proposed approach is validated using a case study from the literature. The advantages and limitations of the proposed approach are thus identified.