Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Does your team procure, setup and put into operation equipment with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure?
Do you work with your equipment suppliers to fully specify the equipment’s functions, performance, and reliability? Maybe not the reliability? [Read more…]
Or, how to master the body of knowledge and be an effective reliability engineer.
Yes, there is a lot to know concerning reliability engineering. You should have a firm grasp of statistics, modeling, laboratory and experimental procedures, failure analysis skills, and more. [Read more…]
If a human is going to build, install, monitor, use, operate, repair, or dismantle, then the design team must consider human factors.
According to Wikipedia
Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.
You may have been tapped one morning and given the assignment. You may have pursued the role either via a university program or by simply applying for the position.
Now what? How do you start in this role? What are you expected to do? [Read more…]
Tim Rodgers interviews Jezdimir Knezevic concerning Dr. K’s pioneering work on the ability of systems to maintain functionality over time, named by him as function-ability.
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Products and equipment start with a design. The functions and performance occur or do not occur according to the capabilities designed into the system.
I learned early in my career, as a manufacturing engineer, that some products were much easier to manufacture (less yield loss) than others, and it was often the design of the product that made the difference. [Read more…]
Maintaining high reliability or availability is a marked advantage for any system. A system that achieves the ability to avoid system downtime due to a single failure event, is essential in many applications. Yet, the fault tolerant capability comes at a price.
A system that achieves the ability to avoid system downtime due to a single failure event, is essential in many applications. Yet, the fault tolerant capability comes at a price.
Here is a short list and brief description of fault tolerant design disadvantages:
The nature of a fault tolerance design is to continue to operate normally even with a component failure.
Thus if the ability to detect a component failure relies on a loss of function or capability, it may be difficult to detect the failure. This sets the stage for a second component failure to cause a system downing event. [Read more…]
A common and poor technique to gather field data is to count the number of returns by week or month. This can provide a graph showing the number of returns over time.
It hides information you need to understand your field failures.
Let’s take a look at a way to gather the same field failure data and retain the critical information necessary for time to failure analysis. [Read more…]
Obtaining certifications based on your reliability engineering knowledge does not make you a professional. It is how you apply your knowledge that does. Let’s explore what it means to be a professional reliability engineer.
It is how you apply your knowledge that does. Let’s explore what it means to be a professional reliability engineer.
In the article, Hypothesis Tests for Proportion, the comparison is between a given value and the sample. In this case, let’s compare two populations. We take a sample which provides a proportion representing each population and determines if the populations are different from each other based on the two samples.
The exact solution uses the Binomial distribution, yet when np and 1 – np are greater than 5, then we can use a normal approximation for the test statistic and critical value. [Read more…]
Fielded products fail day by day. Customers report these failures generally seeking a way to remedy this issue. Gathering the reported or returned products or confirmed failures is common practice.
Depending on the product a simple replacement or exchange may suffice. For other products, repair or a refund may be appropriate.
In general, and not always, when a product fails in the hands of a customer, the organization designing, manufacturing and distributing the product learns of the failure. [Read more…]
In the previous article, What is Reliability Optimization, we defined the concept. One of the elements of optimization is identifying which elements of a system to focus improvement efforts on.
Simply improving every element of a design may provide an overall improvement of reliability performance.
Given constraints such as time or funding, selecting the specific few elements that would provide the most improvement is key. [Read more…]
On occasion, you and the team sit down to review the design.
The idea is to check the design for any issues with the combined wisdom of the people involved. Or, it may be a status update for the entire team providing a focus on the most important issues and action items.
The review may involve all departments, such as marketing, operations, supplier management, and the design team.
It may involve just you and the electrical engineer in a private meeting. In either case, it is a review and a chance to illuminate salient reliability issues and form a consensus on the appropriate action. [Read more…]
