Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
Many of the chemicals we deal with each day are dangerous and need to be handled correctly and safely. Safe use of dangerous goods includes recognising when situations can arise where the consequence of a failure or error will result in danger to life, property or the environment. One of the methods used to minimise risk when dealing with dangerous goods is by separation and segregation.
Keywords: Hazard, storage facility, control, emergency plan, MSDS, material safety data [Read more…]
Customers of your product would like the particular one they have to work. To work over time.
If a product meets the customer’s expectation by working as long or longer than they expected it to do so, then they may consider your product reliable.
We use reliability goals to discuss the customer’s reliability expectations. It is the establishment of requirements that converts the customer expectations to development and production obligations. [Read more…]
My career path in systems engineering. I don’t mean my professional engineering career exactly. My systems engineering portfolio I would say started at about the age of nine if I had to pick a point in time. At nine I made a small hydro-electric power plant in the stream behind my house so I could have light in the woods. I could have taken a purely electrical approach, battery, wires, bulb, or a chemistry approach, matches, wood, oxygen, or a mechanical approach (actually how do you make light mechanically? Sparks??) anyway… But I took a systems approach. [Read more…]
What is a template? Merriam-Webster has two definitions that seem to apply to RCA work. They are: 1) a gauge, pattern, or mold (such as a thin plate or board) used as a guide to the form of a piece being made; 2) something that establishes or serves as a pattern. For our discussion let’s use the second. [Read more…]
Organizations around the world are recognizing the value of reliability engineering. Or, they are realizing that creating a durable product that delights the customer is good for business.
Another contributor to the interest in reliable products is the news of recalls. One recall not only distrupts the normal course of business, it may alter the future of the company. It may cause the collapse of the organization. Some do better than others, yet a major, in the news, recall is something to avoid. Creating a reliable product helps.
So you made it past the initial round of interview and have been called back to talk to the senior folks. As with any job interview, being prepared helps you present your best self. Understanding the business drivers motivating an interest in reliablity is essential for your preperation. This is not how to prepare an accelerated test plan type question, rather it is about how the results of an ALT will provide relevant value to the organization. [Read more…]
It’s Friday so I thought I would go back in the archives and find something light and meaningful. Enjoy 🙂
I can remember thinking my dad was old when he turned 50. While I might look old to my kids I don’t feel old. When I look in the mirror each morning I still see the person I saw yesterday and he doesn’t look any older than he did the day before. [Read more…]
One of the most important, but often the least effective parts of the Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process, is the work order close out step. Here critical data is supposed to be captured and used to improve the job plan, identify future work and improve reliability. All of these add up to improve the profitability of the organization. [Read more…]
Excluding primary practices that still prevail in most industrial companies, the evolution of MRO Materials Management Technology can be summarized in three technological waves, as shown below.
There are many grave technological limitations. However, in view of room limitation, I will mention just two of the most relevant and easy to understand limitations. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
There is a lot of literature written on decision making, ‘how to’, best practices, process, factors and so to follow to make ‘good’ decisions. We have been exploring ‘risk based’ decision making in these blogs. We have looked at factors, process, frameworks, psychology and bias.
But we have not discussed perhaps the most important aspect of any decision – implementation or that double edged word ‘execution.’ (Of course this assumes that the decision maker wants something to actually happen as a result of the decision, but that is a topic for another day).
Let’s use the nicer word – Implementation – which implies there is a course of ACTION, with a timeframe for results to be produced or to occur. [Read more…]
Steam is often used for heating liquids. Heat is provided to a liquid either through a heat exchanger or by direct injection of raw steam. The injection of steam directly into the process is known as steam sparging. The sparge design and location affect the efficiency of the process.
Keywords: boiling, heating water, temperature increase, injector, lance, boiler pressure, properties of steam. [Read more…]
We are rather good at being surprised when setting expectations for the future. This is the essence of risk. The difference between what we expect to occur or would like to occur, and what does occur.
The definition of risk in ISO 9000:2015 and ISO 31000 include the phrase “ effect of uncertainty”. Let’s remove some of the uncertainty around the term uncertainty in the context of risk and risk management. [Read more…]
I don’t know if you recall a post from my blog, “HALT Testing is Not Always In a Chamber”, that discussed what I consider to be the first documented HALT test. Well I just found a video of the design solution in action and it is super cool. I discussed how during 
the development of the F1 rocket motor, for the Apollo space program, they solved a design issue with a HALT technique, although they didn’t call it HALT at the time. The issue they were attempting to solve was the thrust nozzles fracturing due to oscillating vibration. [Read more…]
While working in the field of Asset Management formerly known as Maintenance and Reliability for over 30 years I have worked with my share of Managers and Leaders. Those who have known me for years know that I started in the field as a Pipefitter Apprentice, worked as a Journeyman and Team Leader for a number of years, did a stint as a Maintenance Supervisor, went to night school to become a Reliability Engineer and then as a business owner working with customers around the world. [Read more…]
MTBF is Just the Mean, Right?A conversation the other day involved how or why someone would use the mean of a set of data described by a Weibull distribution.
The Weibull distribution is great at describing a dataset that has a decreasing or increasing hazard rate over time. Using the distribution we also do not need to determine the MTBF (which is not all that useful, of course).
Walking up the stairs today, I wondered if the arithmetic mean of the time to failure data, commonly used to estimate MTBF, is the same as the mean of the Weibull distribution. Doesn’t everyone think about such things?
Doesn’t everyone think about such things? So, I thought, I’d check. Set up some data with an increasing failure rate, and calculate the arithmetic mean and the Weibull distribution mean. [Read more…]