Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Dear friends, this video illustrates how to create and analyze a fractional factorial design using Minitab software with an application example. You can watch our other video on basic concepts in Fractional Factorial Designs: DOE-5: Fractional Factorial Designs, Confounding and Resolution Codes. You can watch all our videos on DOE by clicking here to see the playlist: DOE-2: Application of Design of Experiments. We hope you are finding our videos useful!
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Redundancy in facilities and critical infrastructure is often misunderstood as simply having two of something. However, redundancy is a sophisticated strategy used by systems and reliability engineers to minimize failures and ensure continuous operation. It is one of several approaches to preventing system failures and comes with several key tradeoffs. This article examines four key aspects, or the four horsemen, of redundancy and why it is so important for facilities and critical infrastructure.
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A short video discussing the importance to engineering test data analysis of confidence intervals.
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Sometimes shifting your perspective
is more powerful than being smart.—Astro Teller
A common approach for “no failure” testing is the use of the well-known expression
$$ (1) \quad 1-CL={{R}^{n}}$$
where CL is a confidence level, R is a required reliability, n is a sample size. Its parent is a Binomial distribution with zero failures. This expression is like a poor girl: [Read more…]
Here is a simple checklist of 31 simple maintenance management tips that you can use to improve your operation. Use it as a guide to start you thinking which maintenance management improvement strategies to use to lower your maintenance and operational costs without spending a lot of money.
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Of course, we all know that knowledge is king, but how can we know which resources will deliver valuable insights? The internet has made each of us content creators and publishers if we want to be. According to Statistica, as of February 2020, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute, which equates to approximately 30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour. (And of course, YouTube is not the only video platform! By some measures, TikTok is overtaking YouTube.) It’s safe to say that everyone wants to share their knowledge.
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Explore the future of maintenance with our latest release: “Predictive Maintenance Demystified🚀🔮 In this video, we unravel the world of Predictive Maintenance and how to understand the concept and its benefits.
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Dear friends, many of you have requested for more videos about Design of Experiments. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains basic terms and definitions in DOE. These include OFAT vs DOE, Types of Factors, Levels, treatments, steps in DOE, nuisance or noise factors, blocking, randomization, covariates, etc. Hope you find this video useful to understand these basic concepts.
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Most technical professionals find themselves bogged down by inefficient presentation preparation methods that result in information overload and diluted messaging. We need a better way. Presenting effectively to non-technical professionals is critical for conveying strategic visions, securing stakeholder buy-in, and driving decision-making. Improving the presentation development process results in increased productivity, cost savings, effective communication, and better work-life balance. This article explores ways to streamline the development of better business presentations.
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A result of life testing can be measurement or evaluation of the lifetime.
Measurement of the lifetime requires a lot of testing to failure. The results provide us with the life (time-to-failure) distribution of the product itself. It is long and expensive.
Evaluation of the lifetime does not require as many test samples and these tests can be without failures. It is faster and cheaper [1]. A drawback of the evaluation is that it does not give us the lifetime distribution. The evaluation checks the lower bound of reliability only, and interpretation of the results depends on the method of evaluation (the number of samples, test conditions, and the test time). [Read more…]
Probably every engineer has heard once in his experience terms FMEA and RCA.
What is FMEA?
FMEA is a systematic method for identifying and preventing potential failure modes in a product or process. It helps in proactively addressing failure risks, improving reliability, and enhancing safety. FMEA is crucial in various industries, including automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing, to ensure product quality and customer satisfaction.
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Once upon a time in my former life, I served as the Quality Manager for a $300M tier-one automotive manufacturing plant that provided components and assemblies to OEM vehicle assembly plants. You would recognize our customers – most of the big names. This assignment was a departure from my previous roles in product development and testing. To say that the job was eye-opening is an understatement. Years later, I described this three-year experience to friends as my “tour of duty on the front lines.” Anyone who has spent any time in manufacturing can certainly relate!
Every physical asset has a lifecycle starting at conception through to its eventual disposal and site remediation. In each phase of the lifecycle errors can occur that cause defects within the asset. In operations with hundreds of assets there easily can be tens-of-thousands of defects. Each defect is a risk that eventually contributes to breakdowns, losses, wastes, safety incidents during operation, and shortens the asset’s service lifetime. Eliminating thousands of defects and risks forever is what Plant Wellness Way EAM does for its users
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We should all be aware by now that business agility is the primary enabler for companies seeking sustainability. In the past, companies would evolve in chunks, a project at a time. The costs and risks of implementing change, whether system-related or otherwise, were large, so designing and planning upfront (the Waterfall approach) was applied to create predictability and moderate risks.
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The Kaplan-Meier reliability estimator is the nonparametric, maximum likelihood estimator from right-censored, grouped lifetime data. It has been used since publication, most statistics programs do it, and it has been taught since I was in school. I give away a spreadsheet version.
Lifetime data requires tracking individual subjects or units from their start to failure, death, or censoring. Data may be collected periodically grouped by cohorts: monthly sales, ships, or other collections of individuals, subjects, or units and each cohort’s lifetimes. Data could be displayed in a “Nevada” table with random cohorts in one column, and each cohort’s lifetimes grouped in periodic age-at-failure intervals in columns to the right [Schenkelberg].
