This paper presents a novel sustainable design-oriented level set topology optimization method. It addresses the sustainability issue in product family design, which means an end-of-life (EoL) product can be remanufactured through subtractive machining into another lower-level model within the product family. In this way, the EoL product is recycled in an environmental-friendly and energy-saving manner. Technically, a sustainability constraint is proposed that the different product models employ the containment relationship, which is a necessary condition for the subtractive remanufacturing. A novel level set-based product family representation is proposed to realize the containment relationship, and the related topology optimization problem is formulated and solved. In addition, spatial arrangement of the input design domains is explored to prevent highly stressed material regions from reusing. Feature-based level set concept for sustainability is then used. The novelty of the proposed method is that, for the first time, the product life-cycle issue of sustainability is addressed by a topology optimization method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proved through a few numerical examples.
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