The Disassembly Map: A new method to enhance design for product repairability

Designers and engineers need better tools and methods to create highly repairable products. Design for disassembly and reassembly is an important product related design feature that can enhance repair. In a highly repairable product, the components that fail most often should be easily accessible for repair or replacement. This paper...

Enhancing Consumer Product Repairability: A case study on vacuum cleaners

The European Commission pointed out in 2015, with “An EU action plan for the Circular Economy”, the importance of energy and resource preservation, by respecting Earth’s resilience and renewability (European Commission, 2015). A transition towards Circular Economy is necessary in this sense to create new sustainable advantages, protecting...

Creating an easy-to-use tool for (re)designing repairable products

This project aims to develop an easy-to-use method to (re)design products for ease of disassembly and subsequently for circular strategies, such as repair, refurbish, remanufacture, etc. Improving repairability is one of the first steps in decreasing the environmental impact of products by prolonging their technical lifespan. This thesis focuses...

Improving repairability in cordless vacuum cleaners

The incentive of this graduation project was to determine the repairability of Philips cordless vacuum cleaners and propose strategies to improve their repairability. This was done using two assessment methods; the Disassembly map and the French Repairability Index (FRI). The French Repairability Index is the first mandatory repair label. The...

Towards circular EV chargers: Assessing and improving the circularity of EVBox’s commercial AC chargers

Over the past years, electric vehicle charging company EVBox has, in collaboration with design agency VanBerlo made the first steps in becoming more circular. Within this project further steps have been explored on both strategic- and product level of EVBox’s commercial AC chargers. First, an analysis on the EV context led to the conclusion that...