Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
John Fincham was master shipwright at Chatham and Portsmouth, and the superintendent of the school of naval architecture. He wrote several books about shipbuilding and construction of masts. In 1851, he wrote a history of naval architecture. His history recorded some design changes that the Royal Navy made in the 1700s to improve the reliability of its ships. These changes were important and permanent enough for Fincharm to discuss them 100 years later.
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Risk is the impact of uncertainty on achieving your objectives – the impact can be either positive or negative outcomes (ISO 31000). Governments have multiple objectives they have to meet – health and wellbeing, economic, environmental, ethical and so on. Each of these objectives essentially becomes a risk endpoint. The fundamental tenets of risk assessment are understanding the system (the context), understanding and assessing the risk (against your identified objectives), managing the risk and then monitoring whether the risk is actually controlled, and whether a further risk treatment needs to be applied.[1]
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We now know how to audit our time, to assess our self-leadership, but we can help even further explain how to become more effective and efficient leaders of ourselves.
The first thing we need to do is be empowered to make our own strategy. This comes with a few requirements.
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Based on incident data in biodiesel facilities, I had written that the biodiesel industry in the US is experiencing an incidentevery two-and-a-half months, i.e. approx. 10 weeks.
Here are incidents following my May 2009 blog post on biodiesel incident frequency.
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Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration.
The article provides tips for improving qualitative assessment design. Facilitators develop and use qualitative assessments in the execution of their work. Facilitators should be aware of qualitative assessment design as they seek to bring a group of participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all. [Read more…]
One of the more challenging aspects of FMEA is the subject of Occurrence. Part of every FMEA standard or procedure is the assessment of Occurrence based on an agreed-upon scale. Here are some pointers for when and how to use occurrence in an FMEA.
We’ll start with a definition. The Oxford English dictionary defines “occurrence” as “the fact or frequency of something happening.”
The well-known variance of the Kaplan-Meier reliability function estimator [Greenwoood, Wikipedia] can drastically under-or over-estimate variance. The covariances of the Kaplan-Meier reliability pairs at different ages are ignored or neglected. Variance errors and covariance neglect bias the variance of actuarial demand forecasts. Imagine what errors and neglect do to confidence bands on reliability functions.
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Fatigue involves localized, permanent damage to metals exposed to cyclic stress. In a previous article I discussed the fatigue mechanism. This article covers factors that can be addressed to improve high-cycle fatigue life
Factors that influence fatigue life
Several design, material, and fabrication factors influence component and joint fatigue life, including the following: [Read more…]
In Part 1, we looked at the two relevant dimensions for decision-making under certainty, risk, and uncertainty that form the certainty-uncertainty spectrum are:
Samuel Pepys is famous for keeping a diary from 1660 to 1669. He recorded details of everyday life in London during the Restoration period, including firsthand accounts of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Pepys spent most of his career managing the Royal Navy’s logistics and shipbuilding programs during the second, third, and fourth Dutch wars. From 1673 to 1679, he was the Secretary for the Admiralty. He fought bureaucratic waste and endemic bribery while building the so-called “Thirty New Ships” of 1677. After infighting between political factions, Pepys resigned in 1679 to face trial for corruption himself.
A slidedeck by Mike Sondalini for the SIRFRt CM & Lube Forum 2010 Conference.
Mike examines precision maintenance and the supporting condition monitoring with definitions, processes, and examples.
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Having worked in manufacturing quality for the great majority of my career, with a few tentacles into the field of reliability, I’ve considered many comparisons between the two fields, with of course, my unconscious biases favoring quality. One interesting comparison, for instance, is between job postings for similar positions in these related fields.
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A friend of mine, Dr. Ben Thomas, recently forwarded me a video showing a man escaping incident in matter of seconds.
[Read more…]In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the two relevant dimensions for decision-making under certainty, risk, and uncertainty that form the certainty-uncertainty spectrum are:
Based on these two dimensions, in this Part2, we will be looking at the three conditions along the certainty-uncertainty spectrum that you will face when making decisions under certainty, risk, and uncertainty.
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