Selective disassembly of virtual prototypes

Maintenance and reuse of products often require the disassembly of particular components of the products. In other words, selective disassembly is necessary. This paper presents a method to find the disassembly sequence required to selectively disassemble an identified component of a virtual prototype. Use of the virtual prototype facilitates the disassembly analysis to be performed during the design process. The disassembly sequence and the directions of disassembly of the components are generated, by using the components' mating faces. In the current work a recursive method is used to identify the disassembly sequence required to disassemble the identified/target components. The final output is the disassembly sequence and the range of directions along which the components are to be disassembled to remove the target components from an assembly.