A PRELIMINARY EVALUATION TO SUPPORT DFD OF HANDCRAFTED PRODUCTS

Both economical and environmental aspects significantly influence the design process since the early phases of preliminary design. The total Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)and the End Of Life (EOL)of products have to be defined in the early design phase too. For industrial products that are not addressed to automatic manufacturing processes, the LCA and the EOL are an hard issue. However, the EOL of products, meant as recycling or reusing of parts, can be evaluated by means of the disassembly easiness of joints assembling the product, even when the production process is subject to an important contribute of workmanship. To facilitate this approach, a useful method is proposed in this paper to evaluate the disassembly of products, also of handcrafted products, in order to optimize the design process in the early preliminary phase. The method quantitatively evaluates an index, referred as the Disassembly Index, that describes the attitude of a product to be disassembled in order to recover its components (or its partial subassemblies). A case study is proposed to evaluate the disassembly attitude of structural subassemblies of a sailboat. The comparison to a standard product is proposed in order to test the sensitiveness of the Disassembly Index to automatic manufactured products. As conclusion, good performances to support the EOL evaluation of non conventional products have been demonstrated and a huge sensitiveness of the Disassembly Index to destructive and non destructive procedures is evidenced in the paper.