Reliability Modeling in Design for Remanufacture

Abstract Remanufacture involves the production-batch disassembly, cleaning, replacement and refurbishment of worn parts in defective or obsolete products. For appropriate products, remanufacture offers significant economic and ecological advantages over other end-of-life options. Since the essential goal of remanufacture is part reuse, the reliability of components is important. The goal of this work is to consider reliability effects on life-cycle costs to enable design for reuse. A reliability model is developed to describe systems that undergo repairs performed during remanufacture or maintenance. First, the behavior of the model and preliminary experimental verification of the model are described. The model allows replacement of failed parts with both the same and different types of parts. An example simulation applied the reliability model to compare the effects on life-cycle cost of various combinations of mechanical components in a series system.