Enhancing product design for remanufacturing: guidelines and their implementation in integrated remanufacturing systems

Abstract

Due to unsuitable design decisions, manufactured products are often unable to be remanufactured at the end of their lifetimes. This publication provides comprehensive guidelines for the design of products to facilitate remanufacturing across its various process steps: testing, cleaning, disassembly, reconditioning, and reassembly. By identifying and addressing specific challenges within these stages, products can be optimized to meet the needs or constraints of remanufacturing. Based on an extensive literature review, general product design guidelines for remanufacturing are organized into eight categories: identifiability, accessibility, modularity, manageability, standardization, separability, longevity, and cleanability. Additionally, the guidelines are specified for an integrated remanufacturing system and used to assess the product design of a water meter.

Keywords

• Design for circularity
• remanufacturing
• disassembly
• sustainable manufacturing