Recently, a circular economy has attracted global attention as an approach for addressing material security and resource-efficiency issues. As our societies shift toward a circular economy, manufacturers need to not only produce environmentally conscious products but to also realize reliable systems that will ensure the closure of the loops of the products, components, and materials. To do so, early-stage design is crucial to effectively and efficiently detect possible failures and then take adequate countermeasures against them. Although a few methods of failure analysis have been proposed to address environmental issues, these methods have failed to consider the cause–effect relationships among failures. This will hinder manufacturers from identifying core problems that should be addressed in a given system. Therefore, this study extends failure mode and effect analysis, which is an engineering technique used to address potential failures, by addressing the entire system reliability in relation to circularity. As a result of a case study of a manufacturer aiming to increase circularity with their products on the market, we revealed that the proposed method is useful in the early stage of design to (a) identify failure modes where effects are largely given to or received from other failures, (b) develop countermeasures effectively by addressing root causes of failures, and (c) find an opportunity to collaborate with external actors.

中文翻译：

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从系统角度提高循环性的失效分析方法

最近，循环经济作为解决材料安全和资源效率问题的一种方法引起了全球的关注。随着我们的社会转向循环经济，制造商不仅需要生产具有环保意识的产品，还需要实现可靠的系统，以确保产品、组件和材料的循环闭合。为此，早期设计对于有效和高效地检测可能的故障然后采取适当的对策至关重要。尽管已经提出了一些故障分析方法来解决环境问题，但这些方法未能考虑故障之间的因果关系。这将阻碍制造商确定在给定系统中应该解决的核心问题。所以，这项研究扩展了故障模式和影响分析，这是一种用于解决潜在故障的工程技术，通过解决与循环相关的整个系统可靠性。作为一家旨在提高其产品在市场上的循环性的制造商案例研究的结果，我们发现所提出的方法在设计的早期阶段很有用，以 (a) 识别失效模式，其中影响主要是给予或接受从其他失败中，(b) 通过解决失败的根本原因有效地制定对策，以及 (c) 找到与外部参与者合作的机会。