Redesign of Structural Elements of Passenger Seat Based on Circular Economy Principles

A product's environmental impact spans its entire lifecycle, from creation to disposal. The circular economy aims to eliminate this impact and resource waste by closing resource flow loops. In this perspective, circular design strategies are essential in achieving this goal. The end-of-life products should allow for easy material separation to enable reintegration into production cycles. In this work, design strategies that favor circularity, such as design for disassembly and design for recovery, were considered. The modular redesign of a passenger vehicle seat armrest was conducted with the purpose to achieve modularity, lightness, comfort improvement, easy maintenance, and reconfigurability of the armrest assembly. Finite element virtual tests were performed by using Ansys Workbench, in order to simulate, respectively, a loading condition according to NF F31-119 standard and an act of vandalism to separate the coupled parts of the new armrest. The results obtained in terms of strength and stiffness of the redesigned train seat armrest were considered satisfactory.