Mechanical Bus for Modular Product Design

Modular products consist of detachable modules that can be manufactured, assembled, and serviced separately and may be reusable, recyclable, or remanufacturable upon product retirement. Thus, modular design can provide benefits to many aspects of product life cycle. To realize these benefits, the connections between modules must be designed to facilitate operations for parallel manufacturing, assembly as well as post product life activities. This paper presents a new concept of Mechanical Bus for facilitating modular and platform product design. The characteristics and features of Mechanical Buses have been identified including bus functions, locking and release mechanisms, positioning and locating features and so on. A design method for modular platform design using Mechanical Buses has also been developed. Examples and a case study will be included to illustrate the Mechanical Bus and modular platform product design method.