Book ReviewDisassembly Modeling for Assembly, Maintenance, Reuse, and Recycling, , CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, USA (2005), ISBN: 1-57444-334-8
Introduction
The growing desire of consumers to acquire the latest technology, along with the rapid technological development of new products, has led to a new environmental problem: waste, i.e., end-of-life products. But, as the saying goes that behind every problem is an opportunity, here too there is an opportunity to process waste. Re-processing, i.e., processing of the end-of-life products, means saving natural resources, energy, clean air and water, landfill space, and money. Besides this opportunity of savings, an important driver for an increasing number of companies to engage in re-processing is the enforcement of environmental regulations by local governments.
The first and most important step in most re-processing operations is disassembly. Hence, not surprisingly, a large number of disassembly sequencing and planning methodologies have been reported in the literature in the past decade or so, and it was a matter of time that the important methodologies were explained, rather than merely reviewed, in one volume. This, the first book on disassembly, not only explains in detail, most of the disassembly methodologies, but also comprehensively discusses the theories behind them. The authors, who are well recognized in the field of disassembly, have produced an excellent monograph for an ever-growing number of researchers and practitioners in the field of disassembly.
The book has 419 pages, 81 examples, 102 figures, and 82 tables.
Section snippets
Book content
The book is divided into three parts.
Part 1 (Disassembly Practice) contains 3 chapters, and focuses on the introduction of disassembly process and its implementation on end-of-life complex products. Chapter 1 begins with an interesting observation that “disassembly is virtually as old as mankind and thus is even older than assembly”! It succeeds in its aim of providing an overview of disassembly theory development, by introducing the following in an engaging manner: a historical perspective of
Discussion
Despite the availability of numerous papers in a field, it is always difficult to write the first book in that field because there are no guides available to prospective authors. It must have been especially true for the authors of this book, as the field of disassembly modeling has latently grown quite vast in the past decade.
This is the first book that is focused exclusively on disassembly modeling. If a newcomer in the field needs to get an overview of disassembly and learn the general