Graduation Year

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.S.I.E.

Degree Granting Department

Industrial Engineering

Major Professor

O. Geoffrey Okogbaa,Ph.D.

Keywords

Green design, Eco design, Recycling, Product life cycle, Design

Abstract

In light of increasing pressure from environmental safety advocate groups and governments for eco-friendly manufacturing, safe after life product & waste disposal has had strong emphasizes in the past several years. Industrial manufacturers are becoming more and more responsive towards environment safety concerns. These efforts are being reflected by concepts such as green design or environmentally responsible design and manufacturing (ERDM). The key research areas in the 21st century for reducing the toll on the environment will be material recycling, controlled waste disposal (including fluids and gases) and remanufacturing. Remanufacturing offers a dual advantage over material recycling. First the geometrical form of the product and the functional capabilities are restored with fairly low costs.

Second, it reduces the need for dumping or disposal, making it better for the environment Remanufacturing is also an avenue to enforce product take back which has become important for the integrating environmental considerations. Remanufacturing can be lucrative and thus a motivating factor for the profit oriented industrial community.The work in this research is based on making remanufacturing more distinctive in terms of product design. An approach that incorporates remanufacturing principles at the product design inception phase can be highly beneficial in the context of after life processing of product. The approach used in this research is one of determining a suitable method of calculating the remanufacturing index (RI). The remanufacturing index of a product serves as a beforehand indication of the degree of the efforts return a product to its original geometrical shape and functional capabilities.

This index will provide an insight at the time of initial design of a particular product for understanding afterlife scenarios, which might help to reduce waste, save energy, virgin material, and other resources.The remanufacturing index formulation devised in this research considers all the major aspects of product after life, including disassembly, recycling and other damage correction efforts. This research offers modular analyses of a product for the purpose of remanufacturing. The index is a collection of interfacing elements such as inspection, damage correction and environmental impact. It considers all possible after life aspects of a product and combines them in a systematic manner to give a fair outlook of efforts to remanufacture.

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