ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 focused on the materials aspects of a product and the significance of disassembly process within the process-product chain. This included a concise description of the bulk recycling process. This chapter takes a closer look at the disassembly process itself. It considers a complex product as a set of connected discrete components and the disassembly process as a sequence of (disassembly) operations. The key elements here are components and connections. The relationships between these elements are portrayed via a connection diagram, which forms the basis of theoretical disassembly research. Starting with this connection diagram, various approaches to disassembly operations are discussed and compared. The differences between component-and connection-oriented approaches are highlighted. The distribution of component masses in a product is analyzed. Typologies of materials, connections, fasteners, and disassembly tasks are also presented. A typology of disassembly tasks is one of the basic tools in cost metrics that is important for optimizing disassembly processes. All theory is illustrated with disassembly examples that have been taken from practice. These also demonstrate the hierarchical tree representation, which is frequently used in disassembly analysis and offers an alternative method in representing a product with a definite structure. Finally, an example of a car is considered to illustrate various aspects of disassembly.
