Sustainable design-oriented product modularity combined with 6R concept: a case study of rotor laboratory bench

Modular design is considered as one of the crucial techniques for product design process on account of enabling product to meet consumers’ needs quickly, currently which focuses on enhancing 3R abilities (reuse, recycle, and reduce) promoted through green manufacturing. However, with the rising consciousness of sustainable development, a much broader focus of product modularity is needed for practical sustainable design and manufacturing, which are presented by 6R concept increasing recover, redesign, and remanufacture to the conventional 3R. This paper proposes an effective methodology of sustainable design oriented product modularity to integrate sustainable factors such as environment, economy, and society into product design process through the product representation with respect to module clustering criteria. Especially, the 6R concept is regarded as the basic principle of sustainable design and manufacturing, and hence, this article integrates 6R concept into module clustering criteria such as function, manufacturability, and end-of-life options to achieve objective of sustainable design. In addition, the relationship matrix between components is established utilizing design structure matrix which has great advantages on representing similarity and dependency relationship of component-to-component to determine module structure. Finally, a rotor laboratory bench is utilized as a case study to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.