Proposal of a design method for dismantling products with split-lines

Abstract

This paper proposes a design method for dismantling a product by adding split-lines to the product. This method aims at extracting target components for their reuse, recycling, and proper disposal. The split-lines enable to destruct a product into desired shapes, like pull tabs of cans and caps of PET bottles. The proposed design method supports a designer in determining split-lines to extract a target component. This method classifies the components of the product into shells that surround the target component and finds out the areas in which split-lines can be added for each shell. Then the method finds out candidates of dismantling sequences with split-lines from the candidates of each shell's split-lines. A case study shows that the dismantling of a LCD TV with split-lines reduces the number of manual operations needed for extracting a target component.