Disassembly Efficiency Improvements with Active

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modems, routers, and electric adaptors, has, however, outweighed by the ... seven products included various DSL modems and analog telephone adaptors ...
Disassembly Efficiency Improvements with Active Disassembly Technologies John Carrell, Hong-Chao Zhang, Derrick Tate, and Shiren Wang

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is an advantageous end-of-life activity that can promote reuse, remanufacture, and purer recycling of a product’s subassemblies and components. The benefit of disassembly for small electronic products, such as modems, routers, and electric adaptors, has, however, outweighed by the processing costs because current disassembly methods require one-at-a-time processing. This limits disassembly for these products and thus limits the recovery of valuable materials and components from these products at end-of-life. Active disassembly (AD) has been a means to overcome this disadvantage by incorporating innovative fasteners and elements that can react with an outside stimulus to cause self disassembly of a product [1]. This in turn will allow for batch or mass processing of products for disassembly. This paper will thus focus on the benefits and efficiency gains in disassembly when products are fitted with AD fasteners. Seven electronic products that would normally not be disassembled at end-of-life are analyzed and their theoretical gains with AD are discussed. ISASSEMBLY

I. EXPERIMENT To illustrate this increase efficiency, seven small electronic products were analyzed with integrated AD elements. These seven products included various DSL modems and analog telephone adaptors (ATAs). A manual disassembly analysis for each product was performed to develop as a base disassembly time. AD elements (i.e. SMP snap-fits and screws) were then analyzed based the actuation time for SMP. In this actuation process, submersion heating at a high temperature was used to result in a time of 0.765 minutes. Scenarios for the AD process were developed based on the ability to batch products (20, 50, 100 products) for actuation processing. In these scenarios, a manual component separation time was assumed according to times from the manual disassembly analysis. II. RESULTS Manual disassembly analysis showed short disassembly times per product ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 minutes. This is due to the simple design of the products, which consist of a basic housing and a PCB. Batch sizing plays a critical role in per product disassembly times. This is especially seen with single AD processing which shows an increase in total disassembly time for each product analyzed. Small batch sizes (