Disassembly operations' efficiency evaluation in a virtual environment

Disassembly operations play a very important role during the initial design phase of industrial products. The available disassembly evaluation methods today seldom make disassembly as the preferred end-of-life solution for the reuse of parts or components in an economically sustainable way for lower value products. In virtual environment (VE), for instance, a human model is often involved in a digital mock-up model for assembly/disassembly (A/D) evaluation. However, it has limited application areas because of the high cost investment. Focusing on the evaluation of disassembly operations in a VE, a method based on five new criteria - visibility of a part, disassembly angles, number of tools' changes, path orientation changing, and sub-assembly stability - is proposed here. All five criteria are presented by automatically calculated dimensionless coefficients, thus allowing the evaluation of the complexity of disassembly sequences in a VE. For this purpose, a mixed virtual reality disassembly environment based on Python programming language has been developed, using Visualisation Toolkit and Open Dynamics Engine libraries. The results of the analysis and findings demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach thus providing significant assistance for the evaluation of disassembly sequences during Product Development Process.