Winifred Ijomah

Product design for product/service systems : Design experiences from Swedish industry

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how Swedish industry has adapted theirproducts for product/service systems (PSS).Design/methodology/approach – Three case study companies that manufacture forklift trucks,soil compactors and household appliances are studied. Interviews with company staff are conducted aswell as product analyses in laboratorial environment. The theory is based mainly on previous PSS,design and remanufacturing research.Findings – A key factor when developing products for PSS is to design the product from a life-cycleperspective, considering all the product’s life-cycle phases, namely manufacturing, use, maintenanceand end-of-life treatment. Many of the design improvements deal with the accessibility of parts andcomponents during maintenance and remanufacturing operations, and several of them could reducethe need and cost for maintenance, repair and remanufacturing.Research limitations/implications – Uncovering any additional product requirements needed fora successful PSS not addressed in this paper. For example, it could be interesting to explore whichproduct data could be collected during use in order to improve the products’ different life stages.Practical implications – The findings in this paper illustrate and describe many industrialimplications for engineering designers to consider when developing PSS.Originality/value – The novelty of this paper is aimed for designers to study how they can adapttheir future products used in PSS in a more beneficial way than in traditional product design. Thepaper shows ideas and general guidelines to follow which have been scarcely published.

Development of robust design-for-remanufacturing guidelines to further the aims of sustainable development

Key manufacturing challenges include pollution, natural resource depletion, waste management and landfill space. Remanufacturing, a process of bringing used products to a ‘like-new’ functional state with warranty to match, is being regarded as a vital strategy in waste management and environmentally conscious manufacturing. There is a paucity of remanufacturing knowledge, particularly in design-for-remanufacturing (DFRem) because of its relative novelty in research terms. This paper outlines the elements of the remanufacturing concept, details existing design-for-remanufacturing research and describes findings from recent UK industrial case studies undertaken to verify and augment previous research. It proposes some fundamental steps required to build on past work to improve the robustness of DFRem methodologies.

Design for remanufacturing in China: a case study of electrical and electronic equipment

As global demand for consumer goods continues to rise, the problem of waste electrical and electronic equipment (or e-waste) increases. E-waste is of particular concern to the world’s governments and environmentalists alike, not just because of the sheer quantity that is being produced annually, but also because e-waste often contains both hazardous materials and scarce or valuable materials. Much research is now focused upon how this waste can be treated safely, economically, and in an environmentally sound manner. This paper presents the findings from a literature review and case study research conducted as a small part of the Globally Recoverable and Eco-friendly E-equipment Network with Distributed Information Service Management (GREENet) project. The GREENet project aims to share knowledge and expertise in e-waste treatment across Europe (in this case, the UK) and China. The focus of this particular study was upon ‘design for remanufacture’ and e-waste in China: as a remanufacturing industry begins to emerge, are Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) prepared to design more remanufacturable products and could electrical and electronic products become a part of this industry? Findings presented in this paper suggest that design for remanufacture could become more relevant to Chinese OEMs in the near future, as environmental legislation becomes increasingly stringent and a government remanufacturing pilot scheme expands. However, findings from case studies of Chinese e-waste recyclers would suggest that electrical and electronic products are not presently highly suited to the remanufacturing process.

Status of End‐Of‐Life Electronic Product Remanufacturing in China

Remanufacturing is an industrial process of returning used or worn‐out products to an “as‐new” functional state with an equal warranty to newly manufactured equivalents. In recent years, remanufacturing has become an emerging research area, a direction toward which Chinas economic development is tending as well. As the worlds fastest‐growing solid waste stream, the handling of end‐of‐life (EOL) electronic products has drawn global concern, and China is no exception. Although it is currently at a preliminary development stage, the remanufacturing of EOL electronic products is rapidly developing, supported by relevant policies. There is a critical need for properly structured management systems, especially when it comes to regulations and standards applicable to EOL electronic products - both at the stage of remanufacturing processes and end products. The status of EOL electronic product remanufacturing in China is reviewed from three perspectives: (1) policies, regulations, and standards; (2) research; and (3) industry. The scope for remanufactured electronic products hereby analyzed mainly covers the following products: cartridge; copier; and information technology (IT) servers. For these, there is an urgent development need of methods and/or tools enabling a standardized remanufacturability assessment. Consumers’ willingness to buy remanufactured products could also be promoted through the improvement and dissemination of knowledge and know‐hows related to remanufacturing. The rapid advances in technology and products, and the falling prices of electronic products, could result in an adverse impact on remanufacturing.

Use of active disassembly technology to improve remanufacturing productivity: automotive application

The development of sustainable production approaches is critical because of the link between environmental impact and manufacturing. Remanufacturing, a process of returning a used product to original performance specification from the customers’ perspectives with at least ‘as new’ product warranty, is a strategy to reduce manufacturings environmental impacts whilst boosting profitability. Remanufacturing is poorly understood because of its relative novelty in research terms, for example, in comparison to conventional manufacturing. If considered during the early stages of a products design, active disassembly (AD) can be used to enable the rapid, non-destructive, self-disassembly of products at end-of-life. AD reduces component damage and so facilitates remanufacture. This article explains a potential way forward to fuse ‘AD’ and ‘Design for Remanufacture’ in addressing the goals of sustainable manufacturing. An initial investigation of an automotive ‘electronic control unit’ is tested with a unique form of AD employing an ‘interstitial layer’. Future work is proposed.

Adaptive fusion of color and spatial features for noise-robust retrieval of colored logo and trademark images

Due to their uniqueness and high value commercially, logos/trademarks play a key role in e-business based global marketing. However, existing trademark/logo retrieval techniques and content-based image retrieval methods are mostly designed for generic images, which cannot provide effective retrieval of trademarks/logos. Although color and spatial features have been intensively investigated for logo image retrieval, in most cases they were applied separately. When these are combined in a fused manner, a fixed weighting is normally used between them which cannot reflect the significance of these features in the images. When the image quality is degraded by various reasons such as noise, the reliability of color and spatial features may change in different ways, such that the weights between them should be adapted to such changes. In this paper, adaptive fusion of color and spatial descriptors is proposed for colored logo/trademark image retrieval. First, color quantization and k-means are combined for effective dominant color extraction. For each extracted dominant color, a component-based spatial descriptor is derived for local features. By analyzing the image histogram, an adaptive fusion of these two features is achieved for more effective logo abstraction and more accurate image retrieval. The proposed approach has been tested on a database containing over 2300 logo/trademark images. Experimental results have shown that the proposed methodology yields improved retrieval precision and outperforms three state-of-the-art techniques even with added Gaussian, salt and pepper, and speckle noise.

An analysis of end-of-life terminology in the carbon fiber reinforced plastic industry

Abstract While many studies and reviews into the practices conducted by industry and academia to recycle and remanufacture carbon fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) exist, to date no investigation exists which regards the correctness of the use of the terms recycling and remanufacturing. As such, this paper seeks to analyse the CFRP reuse industry’s attempt to recycle and remanufacture manufacturing waste CFRP and end-of-life (EOL) CFRP with an emphasis on the terminology used to describe these practices. Firstly, this paper presents a justification of the importance of using EOL terminology correctly; outlining the benefits and problems associated with using the correct and incorrect terminology. This paper finds that in the case of CFRP remanufacturing, terminology is being applied incorrectly and in the case of CFRP recycling, particular care should be taken when applying the term recycled to CFRP or stating that CFRP has been recycled. Further, this paper proposes new terminology (in keeping with EU directives) which could be adopted by industry and academia working in this area. This paper also finds that in the case of remanufacture, CFRP is incapable of being remanufactured.

Fusion of Dominant Colour and Spatial Layout Features for Effective Image Retrieval of Coloured Logos and Trademarks

Due to its uniqueness and high value in commercial side, logos and trademarks play a key role in e-business based global marketing. Detecting misused and faked logos need designated and accurate image processing and retrieval techniques. However, existing colour and shape based retrieval techniques, which are mainly designed for natural images, cannot provide effective retrieval of logo images. In this paper, an effective approach is proposed for content-based image retrieval of coloured logos and trademarks. By extracting the dominant colour from colour quantization and measuring the spatial similarity, fusion of colour and spatial layout features is achieved. The proposed approach has been tested on a database containing over 250 logo images. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology yields more accurate results in retrieving relevant images than conventional approaches even with added Gaussian and Salt & pepper noise.

Refurbishment and re-use of WEEE

This chapter will give an overview of WEEE Refurbishment and reuse. It begins by stating why the management of End-of-Life (EoL) electrical and electronic equipment deserves more focus than most other categories of solid waste. It describes and differentiates the reuse processes available for WEEE management, and based on this gives an industry sector specific example by describing the refurbishment of computers. It also outlines the key issues and future trends in that area.

Service-oriented disassembly sequence planning for electrical and electronic equipment waste

We study the multi-objective disassembly sequence planning problem.We propose an optimization algorithm to solve the problem effectively.We design a service-oriented disassembly sequence planning framework.We take e-business technologies to support sustainable business practices. Disassembly sequence planning plays an important role in the end-of-life treatment of electrical and electronic equipment waste (e-waste). Effective planning methods can improve recovery rates and reduce environmental impacts of e-waste. In previous work, neither mathematical models nor optimization algorithms offered a satisfactory solution for this multi-objective disassembly problem. We present a multi-objective model for the problem and a modified teaching-learning-based optimization (MTLBO) algorithm to find the Pareto-optimal frontier. We use numerical simulations to demonstrate and verify the effectiveness and robustness of the algorithm. To do effective disassembly planning, all the participants in the lifecycle of e-waste should work together. Disassembly and recovery of e-waste involve complex processes across the lifecycle. Information support services, disassembly modeling and optimization services must be integrated using computer networks. We also propose a service-oriented framework to support business integration for the participants in the e-waste lifecycle. Effective and optimized disassembly planning can be achieved by invoking the related distributed services. The proposed framework is a novel e-business application for the end-of-life treatment of e-waste.