Flexible Restoration for Remanufacture of Rolling Stock Components

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Increasingly stringent environmental regulations such as WEEE and End-of-Life (EoL) Vehicle Directive require the reuse of waste. Remanufacturing adds value to waste streams by returning EoL items to working order rather than reducing them to their raw material value only, preserves more than 80% of the material and energy used to manufacture a new product [PEARL, 2010], thus is considered as an important element of the circular economy. Restoration, which returns defective parts back to service life is a critical operation of remanufacturing and could account for up to 50% of total remanufacturing cost. Currently restoration is still ad-hoc. Focusing on one-off production resulting from the differential quality of returned defective products, this feasibility study aims to assess and validate a new flexible restoration for the remanufacture of rolling stock components. This would address one of the major barriers hindering the uptake of remanufacturing which is the inability to remanufacture at a cost similar to that of mass production. The results of the study could lead to significant improvement in efficiency, thus promoting the expansion of the remanufacturing industry.