Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
Published in Quality Progress in Nov. 2018, pp 34-39. Final 1/27/18 Posted here with permission of Dr. Wayne Nelson and by his suggestion.
Schenectady, NY , WNconsult@aol.com
In the past five weeks I have been to Miami, Orlando, Cleveland, Chicago, Fairbanks Alaska, Fortuna Costa Rica. For one stint of that I went Fairbanks to Boston to Costa Rica in a 24 hr period. I walked into my home dropped the Alaska suitcase, grabbed the prepacked Cost Rica suitcase, slept for 6 hours ,and was back on a plane 13 hrs later. I think that qualifies as a HALT test considering the lowest temperature I experienced in Fairbanks (Arctic circle edge) was -30F on top of a mountain and then 85F in Costa Rica in the Rainforest.
So why did I do all of this? Because it’s me and it seemed fun.
Anyone who knows me knows I love modifying things. I always feel there is a better design. This is the goal of a reliability engineer at heart. I enjoy sports and I enjoy running. I do believe that we were born to run. If you look at the human body that is clearly what it was built for. Our big toe faces forward, which makes them no longer good for gripping things like branches. But it does make them great for landing a foot in forward motion. We have extremely long legs in proportion to our bodies compared to all other primates. We are slender which provide a great ratio of surface area to mass for cooling. The ability to sweat without hair is a great temperature control method as well. We are also the only mammal that can uncouple our breathing to our running pace because we are bipeds. This let’s us optimize our breathing for long distance.
Jezdimir Knezevic of the MIRCE Akademy published a paper with the title above and I have a few comments.
In the article, Jezdimir suggests that the statistical approach to describing the world about us is fundamental flaws and not inherently useful for our use. He compares a mathematical/statistical approach to a scientific approach and finds the stats wanting.
Let’s take a critical look at the topic of this paper and conclusions. [Read more…]
The Mars Rover is an incredible reliability story. And as you may know they have decided to permanently shut it off. A friend recently sent me this email when he saw an article on it.
Hey Adam,
The Opportunity rover was supposed to last 90 days, and instead lasted 15 years.
Is that due to remarkable engineering, or was the machine really supposed to last that long and the scientists blew their calculations as to its “lifespan”?
Mark,
My response:
I introduced my new program tool “Program Risk Effects Analysis” (PREA) at the RAMS Conference in Orlando this week. It’s a great tool to assist in accessing if program schedule or resource should accommodate found design risk from testing or analysis.
-Adam
“Use Case 7” is a concept I am rolling out. Use Case 7 is the way a customer may use your product in a manner that is way beyond anything you expect.
Examples:
Happy New Year! And thank you for letting us break your stuff to improve your design in 2018. This is a story of when I was NOT invited to break things but did anyway.
Before you go on, please have a look at British comedian John Oliver’s video on infrastructure – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8.
OK, if you are reading this and still haven’t watched the video … please go back and try again. You can do it.
If you haven’t watched the video by now, then I concede defeat. In short, the video is a humorous take on the state of US infrastructure. Particularly bridges. Bridges have been collapsing with alarming frequency in recent years. And after much political wrangling there is still no plan to pay for fixing crumbling columns, spans and struts. It is not as if the federal and state governments don’t know how bad things are (again … watch the video).
Oliver proposes a perhaps novel reason for all of this. [Read more…]
Alright … this needs a lot of context. English electronic music artist ‘Fatboy Slim’ released his ‘You’ve come a Long Way, Baby’ album in 1998. Its cover art was a photograph of an attendee at the 1983 ‘Fat People’s Festival’ in Danville, Virginia. And perhaps due to its ‘heritage,’ the album’s cover was changed to an image of a bookshelf for North American listeners. But the rest of the world got to bask in its magnificence.
So what is particular about this photograph? The subject is a larger than average human (as you would expect noting where it was taken). And he is wearing a shirt emblazoned:
I’m #1 so why try harder?
I am not writing this as a commentary on human value versus instinctive stereotypes. Far from it. There are plenty of people who are ‘better than all others at something’ that do not have sleek chiseled physiques. [Read more…]
When something is working it is easy to just keep going forward. But how do you know things will keep chugging along? Is it worth stopping and asking “Why is this going well?”
I like lock picking “Lock Sport.” Of course I do. It’s a mechanical puzzle. It can also make you look like James Bond when someone forget’s their keys. I continue to challenge myself by getting progressively harder and harder locks. Throughout the years lock designs have come up with some great features to resist being picked. But there is still not one out there that is “pick proof”, so there is always a next level. I would say I am a mid-intermediate in the world of Lock Sport. So any lock that actually has good picking defenses can give me a good struggle.
As a reliability guy I love seeing how stuff works. Was recently given an opportunity to mess around and compare a new product to it’s siblings in a field I love, welding. I recently provided some input on an article release by Superiorglove about types of insulation and heat conduction. Superiorglove is a glove manufacturer that makes about every type of glove you could imagine, many are really impressive industrial applications gloves. I like how much they get into the science of it. In our discussions I used an example of how my TIG welding gloves protect against conductive and radiative types of heat transfer. They informed me that they had a TIG welding glove line and would love if I would review four of their models. I happily accepted because I love to weld, check out how things work and …free gloves.
I am frequently asked to review engineering reports and documents. And I am continually baffled with how many engineers want to ‘take their reader on a journey’ as opposed to getting to the main point. These engineers write documents where you have to read every single word to work out what they are trying to say. But having a final reveal is never a good thing in any technical document. [Read more…]
