Abstract
Every year, in Europe, end-of-life vehicles (ELV) generate between 8 and 9 million tonnes of wastes. To minimise the impact of the end-of-life vehicles on the environment, the European Parliament has approved in September 2000 the European Directive on end-of-life vehicles. This Directive set a minima recovery rate for the end-of-life vehicles and financially involves the manufacturers in the elimination process of ELV.
Within the line of its environmental policy and in anticipation of the regulation, PSA Peugeot Citroën has engaged several actions to incorporate recycling requirements in the vehicle design phase. One of these actions was to develop a design methodology to improve the ELV recovery rate. This contains a rules bases and an evaluation tool. These tools are destined to the designers, to work on in the function level. Now, PSA Peugeot Citroën wants to expand this approach to the vehicle level.
That why a PhD thesis has been engaged in collaboration with the CPN (Conception de Produits Nouveau) laboratory of the ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure dArts et Métiers) and the ADEME (Agence De lEnvironnement et de la Maîtrise de lEnergie). The aim of this work is to develop an assessment tool of the Recovery Aptitude of a Vehicle and a method to integrate this parameter on the design process.
A state of art of the design process and the methodologies of the Recyclage division (where the study is realised) has permit to take all the complexity of the problematic.
These observations allowed us to orientate the studies towards two themes:
- Development of calculation mode for the recovery rate and the treatment cost of a vehicle;
- Development of an integration and management method of these parameters in the vehicles projects, during all the stages of design.
The major difficulty of this study is to have a global vision of the vehicle. In fact, the data are very divided during the design; they also are very difficult to collect and to process. To be pertinent, the method should be integrated into the organisational and informational structure of the design team.
To do so, we will propose a first model on the method of the Recovery Aptitude of a Vehicle (RAV).
Such a method shall have three functions:
- Set objectives for the recovery vehicle ratios and processing costs, then for the functions (data vary with the type of vehicles and are enclosed into the specification book as far components to be developed);
- Consider local assessments (as functions or bodies) as a global result and take into account vehicle characteristics;
- Manage all RAV parameters for the vehicle (redefine the objective per function, etc.).
We will develop the methodology, the structuring of the actions and the tools in the design process. We will illustrate this approach with testing the method on a vehicle development project.
PSA Peugeot-Citroën should eventually be in a position to provide design teams and leaders for vehicle development projects. Such means shall enable us to follow the recovery indicators evolution of the project, since the beginning of the project to the start of the fabrication, to direct the choice of the leaders and measure the impact choice of the design on these indicators.