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on Product Reliability

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10 Ways to Find Reliability Value

10 Ways to Find Reliability Value

Most everyone agrees that improving a product or process reliability is a good thing. It’s good for customers, factories, and our business. And sometimes it’s difficult to answer the question,

‘What is the value of that reliability activity?’

What if your boss asks you what value you provide to the organization? Your answer may to harder to compose than you think.

How would you quantify your skills, experience, and knowledge and your role within the complex formal and informal working environments? [Read more…]

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5 Steps to Building a Reliability Culture

5 Steps to Building a Reliability Culture

Reliability is not the sole responsibility of the reliability engineer but results from nearly everyone in an organization making decisions that move toward the desired product reliability performance.

As a reliability professional, I often find it necessary to explore ways to leverage my knowledge of these areas to change the culture within an organization to create a sustainable program that achieves reliable products time and again. [Read more…]

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You May Often be Exceeding Operating Specifications!

You May Often be Exceeding Operating Specifications!

HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) requires exceeding specifications

One aspect of HALT, (a test to find weaknesses and reliability risks empirically), is the difficulty for many engineers that are new to the HALT- that it guarantees that the maximum or recommended operating environmental specifications for the system and components under test will be exceeded, and failures beyond spec are potentially relevant to field reliability. [Read more…]

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Required Case History for Reliability Engineers

Required Case History for Reliability Engineers

One for the (Reliability) Books

The GM Ignition switch failure case history should be required reading for all reliability engineers.

It is rare to have insight into any internal company history of serious electronic and electromechanical failures. Failure analysis and the causes of electronics or electromechanical systems failure can be a difficult investigation for any manufacturing company. Disclosure of the history and data is rarely if ever published due to the potential liability and litigation costs as well as loss of reputation for reliability and safety.

[Read more…]

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The Environmental Test Manual

The Environmental Test Manual

Let’s say you run across a lightweight, inexpensive, easy to manufacture metal that you are considering for a new bike frame. Beyond the functional considerations of strength, size, and finish options what else do you consider?

Is it durable? If it fails how does it fail (a shattering a bicycle frame would not be good, for example). You may also consider how the bicycle will be used and stored. What stress will the frame experience over its lifetime? [Read more…]

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Electronics Failure Analysis Done the Right Way

Electronics Failure Analysis Done the Right Way

“Failures are gold”

Early in my career the engineering manager relished discovering equipment failure.

It didn’t matter if it was human, electronic, mechanical or software in nature, the glint in his eye soon gave way to a flood of possibilities. He enjoyed the process of investigating the fundamental reasons a failure occurred. [Read more…]

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Eliminating early life failures

Eliminating early life failures

MTBF for electronics life entitlement measurements is a meaningless term. It says nothing about the distribution of failures or the cause of failures and is only valid for a constant failure rate, which almost never occurs in the real world. It is a term that should be eliminated along with reliability predictions of electronics systems with no moving parts. [Read more…]

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Electronics Failure Prediction Methodology does not work

Electronics Failure Prediction Methodology does not work

 

“When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails.  One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.” ― Albert Einstein

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” – Niels Bohr* We have always had a quest to reduce future uncertainties and know what is going to happen to us, how long we will live, and what may impact our lives.  Horoscopes, Tarot

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Nevada Charts to Gather Data

Nevada Charts to Gather Data

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…]

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Why success with HALT begins long before doing HALT

Why success with HALT begins long before doing HALT

Implementing a new reliability development paradigm in a company which is using traditional, standards-based testing can be a perilous journey.

It is especially true with introducing HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) in which strength against stress, and not quantifying electronics lifetimes is the new metric.  Because of this significant change in test orientation, a critical factor for success begins with educating the company’s top  [Read more…]