The selective disassembly involves removal of one or more selected components from a multi-component assembly. Despite the advances in assembly and disassembly analysis that focus on disassembling all the components in the assembly, there has been little investigation of the techniques for the selective disassembly of components. The current research presents methods and design-aids for an automated selective disassembly analysis at the product design stage.; A new concept called Disassembly Wave is developed to arrange the components in the assembly denoting the disassembly order. Utilizing the concept of the disassembly wave (represented in a graphical form) several geometric algorithms for selective disassembly analysis are proposed. These algorithms analyze the contact-geometry and spatial constraints of the assemblies so as to determine the sequence and the paths for the selected components. The proposed algorithms are implemented in a new prototypical software called Assembly and Disassembly in three-Dimensions which has been developed to assist the designer in performing an automated and interactive selective disassembly analysis. The results from the prototypical software for the 30 test assemblies analyzed, show that the proposed geometric algorithms enable determining an efficient selective disassembly solution with fewer number of removals computed in a feasible time. Moreover, the ability allowing the designer to generate, edit, validate, evaluate and animate the selective disassembly sequence and paths of components by the developed prototypical software, demonstrate it as a potential automation tool for the virtual selective disassembly analysis as well as its applicability to maintenance, assembling and recycling.
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