Group description

The research areas of the I2M Mechanical Design Department (IMC) address design methods and tools (for products, services or production systems) and the links between products and processes (industrialization) over the whole lifecycle, from of technical efficiency and environmental evaluation perspective. The research themes addressed for industrial applications focus on considering the end-of-life for ecodesign and the integration of environmental constrains in the product design, manufacturing stages and end-of-life: recycling of polymers and composite is a main application for this activity. Ecodesign is a way to improve circular economy and the valorization of product et their end-of-life (subparts and elementary components) to improve recycling solutions.

The proposed topic(s) aim at improving the circularity of end-of-life products (identification and disassembly: topic 1), using reconfigurable manufacturing systems (topic 2) to improve the end-of-life treatment of physical products (maybe with a focus on electric or mechatronic products) in a perspective of product valorization based on cost or criticality (topic 3).

Reconfigurable production systems are an issue to make circularity viable in the sense that their physical and logical structure can be changed quickly and at all levels of system composition, to adjust the production capacity and functionality around a family of products in response to changes (market, quantity, type, etc.) and at lower cost and effort.

Today challenges are based on automated disassembly and sorting solutions to improve product recovery or material sorting and reduce time and costs for this operation. One way to tackle this is to work on both disassembly solution, and reconfigurable assembly lines that could be changed for disassembly, even repair or reassembly based on recovered components.

Challenges include the definition of:

Robotics / cobotics / manual with VR to AR solution for disassembly / repair / reassembly / sorting (topic 1);

Reconfiguration possibilities and solutions to switch from manufacturing to disassembly (topic 2);

Definition of the information system for product evaluation (value), for operator support (robot or human), for components testing before and after disassembly, in connection with residual value recovery (topic 3).