Smart materials such as shape memory alloys (SMA) are now offering the possibility of allowing complex items to be disassembled easily and in a potentially cost-effective manner.
[1] Companies designing and manufacturing a range of consumer goods are becoming increasingly subject to legislative and other pressures requiring them to consider the "End of Life" (EoL) implications of their products.
The ELV (End of Life Vehicle) Directive in Europe, for example, states that the current reuse and recycling level of 75% (by weight) has to be raised to 85% by 2015.
[2] The WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive is aimed at the eradication of landfill as a means of disposing of hazardous materials such as arsenic in LEDs.
In the past designing products such as cars rarely involved consideration of what would happen when they were scrapped, although some companies, such as BMW have been pro-active in this respect.
He conducted experiments including crude force methods to highly tuned approaches such as temperature, electrical resistance, vibration, volume, explosive, chemical, induction and bio triggered disassembly techniques.
His conceptual ideas to use the volume increase of frozen water to disconnect certain parts of a product or to use soluble fasteners, are described in his dissertation published in 2000.
Disassembly at the end of a product's useful life is an inevitably complex and time-consuming operation to ensure effective separation of all component parts for subsequent re-use or recycling.
These methods generally require the use of smart materials which respond to a stimulus in order to change shape or size and thus facilitate the release of parts.
These materials offer significant shape changes at a range of transition temperatures, which are achieved by methods involving infrared, microwave, supercooling, chemicals and direct heat.
Screws, rivets, ribbons, bars and clips, specially designed to facilitate AD, can be manufactured from smart materials such as SMAs and SMPs.