Guillaume Mandil

A remanufacturing process library for environmental impact simulations

Abstract‘Closed loop’ end-of-life strategies such as remanufacturing must be applied to create eco-efficient products. Remanufacturing may be a key element in reducing the environmental impact of products, but this remains to be proved. The aim of this study is to help designers evaluate the environmental impacts of their remanufacturing process during the design phase. The first task is to identify, list and classify the various remanufacturing processes (disassembly, cleaning, sorting and controlling, reconditioning, reassembly) by the type of process and then estimate the environmental impact for each process. These processes are then formalized by characterization and organized in a database. Using a simulator, the different processes can be aggregated to assess the environmental impacts of a remanufacturing line. An example is presented in the last part of this paper to illustrate the proposal.

Defining tools to address over-constrained geometric problems in Computer Aided Design

This paper proposes a new tool for decision support to address geometric over-constrained problems in Computer Aided Design (CAD). It concerns the declarative modeling of geometrical problems. The core of the coordinate free solver used to solve the Geometric Constraint Satisfaction Problem (GCSP) was developed previously by the authors. This research proposes a methodology based on Micheluccis witness method to determine whether the structure of the problem is over-constrained. In this case, the authors propose a tool for assisting the designer in solving the over-constrained problem by ensuring the consistency of the specifications. An application of the methodology and tool is presented in an academic example.

Extraction of features for combined additive manufacturing and machining processes in a remanufacturing context

The emergence of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques in the last 30 years allows to build complex part by adding material in a layer-based fashion or spraying the material directly into the part or a substrate. Taking into account performance of these techniques in a ‘new remanufacturing strategy’ can open new ways to transform an end-of-life (EoL) part into a new part intended for another product. The strategy might allow a considerable material proportion of existing parts to be reused directly for producing new parts without passing through the recycling stage. In this work, the strategy enables the transformation of existing parts into desired parts is first presented. The strategy uses an adequate sequence of additive and subtractive operations, as well as inspection operations to achieve the geometry and quality of final parts. This sequence will be designed from a set of AM features and machining features, which are extracted from available technical information and the CAD models of existing part, and final part. The core of the paper focuses on the feature extraction approach. The approach development is based on the knowledge of AM processes and machining process, as well as the specifications of final part.