Abstract
Due to rise of environmental awareness in recent years, engineering designers are required to consider not only product performance but also whole product lifecycle in order to reduce environmental burdens of their products. Especially, a product in End-of-Life (EoL) phase has great impact to environment. Because of this, design for disassembly (DfD) has attracted great attention to promote product recyclability and reusability. This paper applies modular design, originally a technique intended to short the lead time and improve assimilability, to DfD to reduce disassembly process. Although a lot of works about modular design has done, since existing methods configure modules based on similarities of components' lifecycle characteristics without consideration of hierarchy of a product function structure, there is a possibility of obtaining functionality and geometrically infeasible modules. This paper proposes the method optimizing product modular structure according to hierarchy of a product functional structure to get feasible modules from the perspectives of function and geometry. The optimization is conducted by Hierarchical Genetic Algorithm (HGA) which can describe hierarchical structure of mechanical system exactly. The proposed method is applied to a design of the inkjet printer to demonstrate its effectiveness.
