Abstract
In Japan, easy-to-dismantle vehicle design has been demanded following the
enforcement of The Automobile Recycling Law. It is necessary to design product structure so
that parts can be easily removed from the body, and also recyclable parts have to be collected
as a large mass of the material. The collection rate of recycling parts removed from scrapped
vehicles largely depends on product design. This paper focuses on removing large plastic
parts, which is one of the issues for improvement in easy-to-dismantle vehicles. It especially
takes a substantial amount of time and number of operations to remove an instrument panel
from the body since its shape and assembly structure is complicated. In order to improve the
collection rate, slits and dismantle marks to indicate removal positions are designed in plastic
parts so that they can be dismantled easily. However, to determine the position of the slits and
dismantle marks, case studies are repeated using actual parts. Therefore the evaluation must
be conducted many times and a large number of parts must be used.
To solve these issues, a breakage analysis has been devised in accordance with the breakage
behavior resulting from a tensile test on specimens by using ABAQUS, a commercial non-linear
three-dimensional FEM code. This method has considerably shown a correlation
between the removal test and FEM of the instrument panel. With this method, dismantlability
can be estimated with a simple calculation, and it can be applied in short lead-time
development. The method is a radical breakthrough and most versatile as a tool for examining
dismantle behavior such as breakage areas and the sequence of dismantlability at the drawing
stage. Recent model results show that dismantle time is reduced by approximately 40%, the
collection rate improved by approximately 10% as compared to the previous model by
applying the method for determining the optimum structure.
Keywords: instrument panel, dismantling, recycle, plastic, FEM