Disassembly Process Simulation in Virtual Reality Environment

Integration of disassembly operations simulation during product design is an important issue today. A method for ergonomic evaluation of disassembly operations is presented here. It is based on three new criteria, presented by dimensionless coefficients: visibility score, neck score and bending score. The method is integrated in a Virtual Reality Disassembly Environment (VRDE) based on Python programming language using mixed VTK (Visualization Toolkit) and ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) libraries. The framework is based on STEP, WRL and STL exchange formats. The proposed method is tested and an example for disassembly sequences evaluation is presented. The results of the analysis and findings demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach thus providing significant improvement in Product Development Process (PDP).