Design for sustainable remanufacturing

Directeur(s) de thèse : Peggy ZWOLINSKI 

Ecole doctorale IMEP2

Date de début  (souhaitée) : Septembre 2012

Financements envisagés - Contexte - Partenaires éventuels

Appel à projet : G8 Research Councils Initiative on Multilateral Research Funding

Projet futuREman - Partenaires : Rolf Steinhilper (lead. University of Bayreuth), Mitsutaka Matsumoto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology), Emmanuel Caillaud (Université de Strasbourg).

Description du sujet

Goal of the futuREman project is the development of guidelines and technologies to enable the economic remanufacturing of components installed in electric vehicle (EV) drives to extend their life-cycle and reduce resource consumption.

During the last decades automotive engineering has been advancing constantly. However, the main drive system remained almost unchanged. Today, the whole automotive branch is faced with electromobility (battery electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles) which implies new or improved technologies and materials, new or altered parts, parts with unknown lifetimes as well as the uncertain market launch and share of the individual drive concepts and topologies. Being players of the independent automotive aftermarket (IAM), remanufacturing companies are not involved in and have no influence on the current design process of EV components. The resulting lack of expertise involves that remanufacturing companies will strongly be affected by the technical changes lying ahead. Currently, there are no guidelines and technologies available to remanufacture EV components, what means an uncertain future for the whole remanufacturing branch.

Remanufacturing - the industrial reconditioning of products - is a kind of product recycling and thus an intrinsically material efficient process. Keeping remanufacturing alive helps reducing material demand besides saving jobs and preserving competition. Due to the growing number of electric and electronic parts, material efficiency becomes more important because of the increasing demand for expensive elements like rare earth and precious metals.

To this background its essential to find out and embed the needs of remanufacturing in this early evolution stage of EV components. While research for EV drive systems, battery and charging technology is in full swing, research concerning the effects of EVs on the IAM is lagging far behind. This project will pick up these deficits in order to enable the future remanufacturability of car components even in the age of EVs and sustain growth in this material saving branch.