This PhD position is part of the academic network working on ecodesign, an international research and training initiative. The network aims to advance ecodesign methodologies and manufacturing strategies that enable circular economy practices at industrial scale, in line with European sustainability and resource efficiency policy objectives.
Re and demanufacturing of electromechanical products is increasingly recognized as a key enabler for circular economy strategies such as reuse, repair, refurbishing, and remanufacturing. However, current re and demanufacturing processes still face major challenges due to product variability, process complexity, limited automation scalability, and high operational costs. While robotic disassembly technologies have progressed, existing approaches typically focus on isolated process steps and do not sufficiently account for human robot cooperation, nor do they fully integrate sustainability considerations into product design decisions.
Existing design assessment tools, such as disassembly oriented metrics (e.g. Re DiM), remain limited in scope, primarily addressing disassembly while neglecting other critical activities such as diagnostics, cleaning, sorting, and remanufacturing. Moreover, comprehensive methodologies that systematically support design for human robot cooperative re and demanufacturing across different electromechanical product categories are currently lacking.
The objective of this PhD project is to develop an ecodesign framework for electromechanical components and systems that enables efficient and robust human robot cooperative re and demanufacturing processes. The research will explicitly address design trade offs between durability, ease of automation, human intervention, and sustainability performance.
Building on existing methodologies, the project will expand the scope of current design metrics to cover a wider range of re and demanufacturing activities and product types. In the larger project setting, the development of this framework will be combined with a holistic sustainability assessment framework, integrating environmental (LCA), economic (LCC), and social impact perspectives, to support informed design decision making.
- Validation and industrial relevance
The developed methodologies will be validated through industrial case studies in collaboration with European manufacturing and remanufacturing companies. For this the PhD includes two mandatory international secondments (2-3 months), providing direct exposure to industrial design practice, advanced manufacturing technologies, and real world remanufacturing constraints.
The objective is that the information acquired through the proposed methodologies throughout the design process, to assess and steer product design, is also included in the Digital Product Passport to support re- and demanufacturing activities. Diverse robotic setups will be available to validate both design improvements and the value of the acquired information and proposed data structures in the newly established remanufacturing light house laboratories at Flanders Make @ KU Leuven, in Belgium, Heverlee, managed by the LCE research group.
Through this combination of methodological development, experimental validation in the laboratories, and industrial collaboration, the objective is to generate actionable design knowledge that supports the goal of advancing scalable, sustainable, and policy-aligned circular design and manufacturing strategies.
