INTRODUCING DESIGN FOR DISASSEMBLY CONCEPT TO THE MSC CURRICULA

Design for Disassembly (DfD) can be used for driving desired environmental care and protection. It allows lowering pollution and extention of product life cycle. Unfortunately most of business-oriented curricula include the topic of environment protection, but omit important DfD process technique. This paper presents idea of introducing it into Msc curricula, which has been done at WSB University in Gdańsk (Poland).

In the first part of the paper the concept of Design for Disassembly and its connection with environment protection has been described. Authors discuss importance of waste management and recycling in modern world. Connections between recycling ability of used products and their design should focus on elimination of the possibility of unproper parts installation. Components should be projected as modules rather as one "piece", eg. using one “plastic block” with precaution to possibility of dismantling product. Using DfD enables repair instead of so often nowadays replacing whole product with a new one, which leads directly to excessive consumption of natural resources and environmental pollution at the same time. Spreading this idea among MSc students seems to be very important task in shaping ecological attitude of future engineers.

The second part of the work describes the concept of introducing Design for Disassembly topic to MSc curricula through practical exercises. They include practical exercise on disassembly of a real product connected with finding difficulties on their disassembly and ways of projecting techniques enabling future easy repairs.