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With the development of manufacturing industry, environmental issues have grown increasingly important; remanufacturing has thus been proposed as a means of improving manufacturing sustainability. Cleaning of the used product is one of the most demanding steps of remanufacturing and is usually taken to be the main polluting stage. Traditionally, the cleaning of engines has included thermal cleaning as the pre-treatment, followed by physical cleaning such as abrasive blast cleaning or ultrasonic cleaning. In this paper, a novel and environmentally friendly method of remanufacturing cleaning is proposed, using supercritical carbon dioxide (SCCO2) to remove oily contamination on discarded engine components. A comparison is conducted between this method and thermal cleaning, as pre-treatments, followed by abrasive water jet cleaning and ultrasonic cleaning to remove the pre-treatment residues. The results demonstrate that supercritical fluid cleaning is an ideal alternative to thermal cleaning when remanufacturing aluminium parts with low melting points.

This paper reports a method of on-line recycling for abrasives while using abrasive water jet to clean components to be remanufactured. It uses a stirring overflow separator to realize the separation of abrasives and dirt. Abrasives are broken into pieces due to the impact in cleaning process, and the contamination cleaned off mingles with abrasives suspension, all of which seriously influence the cleaning effect. Meanwhile, as new high-tech abrasives (such as ceramic abrasive, silicon carbide abrasive) appear continuously, the proportion of abrasives in wet abrasive blasting cleaning cost is increasing. Thus, it's more important to reuse the abrasives. The recycling of abrasives makes the abrasive water jet cleaning greener, more economical, and more sustainable.

A new way to determine the optimal remanufacturing point of lithium ion batteries for electric vehicle has been proposed in this paper. The proposed optimal remanufacturing point can avoid the sharp degradation stage of battery and ensure most of active materials covered in electrodes reused in remanufacturing process with modest cost and energy. In order to find out the optimal remanufacturing point in our experiment, the charge-discharge cycle of lithium ion batteries was carried out by using battery testing system and internal resistance meter, which can obtain enough data such as the degradation of capacity, the change of internal resistance, the charging and discharging rate and the cycle life of battery for analysis. Then the optimal battery's remanufacturing point about 500-550 cycle times has been found.

Environmental issues are recognised as being increasingly important, especially in the 21st century; researchers have thus proposed remanufacturing as a means of improving manufacturing sustainability. Cleaning the end-of-life products, that saves commercial values, is one of the most demanding steps and is usually one of the most polluting stages. Product surface coatings, are especially difficult to remove, in this process, because they have been designed to be robust during the service. Traditional methods, aqueous cleaning for instance, are either water consuming or use large amounts of chemical cleaning agents, which are obviously environmentally unfriendly. In this paper, a new approach to removing the paint layers on the surface of the retired product is proposed. The cleaning uses supercritical carbon dioxide (SCCO2) as the pre-treatment, and then wet shot blasting cleaning removes the residues on the treated surfaces. It is difficult to get paint layers in the same condition and the real products are too big for the experimental platform. Experiments were thus carried out using metallic paint sprayed on the steel, with uniform dimensions, mimicking the real paint coatings on the products. The mechanism of SCCO2 treatment was first analysed and specimens treated in different conditions were illustrated. Single-particle shot experiments were afterwards carried out to determine the proper cleaning parameter. The eventual cleaning results using wet shot blasting demonstrated that theoretical analysis was appropriate in this SCCO2 treatment. The resultant cleaning, by use of these two methods, showed satisfactory removal results.