Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
In this episode I discuss two lessons I learned as a process engineer in the semiconductor fab. One lesson was a real-life example of the effects of manufacturing processes on metal microstructure and the resulting effects on a metal property that was used to monitor a manufacturing process. The other lesson was about the fallacy of engineering or scientific ingenuity.
Sometimes we need to gather with our team and come up with some ideas, whether we’re looking for new product ideas, trying to discover possible solutions, or we need to improve a service.
Gathering a team to come up with ideas is common. What are some of the ways we approach this activity? We talk about systematic and structured methods and new approaches to brainstorming.
What does this title mean? Chris and Fred discuss how some vendors make ‘startling’ claims regarding reliability from some small amounts of test data. So where does this 60th percentile some of us hear from time to time come from?
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Steve is an experienced Maintenance & Reliability professional with experience in organizational leadership, project development, & change management. He is the host of the podcast “Fire Forged Leader”. Fire Forged Leader serves it’s listeners by exploring leadership lessons while talking to successful leaders in all areas of life. Check it out on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fire-forged-leader/id1621708130
Kirk and Fred discussing the use of statistics in reliability engineering, where they are useful and where their use may not be the most efficient way to find and fix the cause of failure.
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As engineers, we need to write reports all the time.
Are ours getting returned by reviewers frequently?
Or are we not getting any feedback and are not sure when our report is ‘done’?
We explore the spirits of technical writing past, present, and future – they help us to write for ALL of our audiences. We explore how and why in the episode.
Historically, circuit assemblies are rigid devices. IoT (Internet of Things) has opened up the opportunity to embed electronics into a near limitless array of form factors. Some of these form factors require the electronic assembly to be flexible such as in wearable and medical applications.
To complicate matters, The metal conductors on the assembly are rigid, and not flexible or malleable. That may change with the adoption of liquid metals. We were all exposed to the concept of liquid metal in the 1991 film Terminator 2. Will science fiction become reality?
My guest today is Dr. Michael Dickey. Michael is currently the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at NC State University.
Michael Dickey received a BS in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of Texas. From 2006-2008 he was a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Professor George Whitesides at Harvard University. Michael completed a sabbatical at Microsoft in 2016. Michael’s research interests include soft matter (liquid metals, gels and polymers) for soft and stretchable devices (electronics, energy harvesters, textiles, and soft robotics), and hopefully, for the sake of humanity, not liquid metal T1000 villains.
Dr. Michael Dickey’s Contact Information:
mddickey@ncsu.edu
Link to Michael Dickey’s TED-X Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfUnK_rME8E
Kirk and Fred discussing the idea of listing of failure mechanisms and their different viewpoints on how we learn some of the common failure mechanisms
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Dianna and Fred discussing single use product reliability. For products that are used once and then disposed or recycled, do we need to consider and plan for their reliability? The short answer: yes! They talk about the things to consider with single use products.
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I discuss my education, my experience working in a semiconductor factory and as part of a product design group, and the many different product design and manufacturing activities I was involved in as a metals engineer.
What are the gifts others bring to new product development?
It takes intentional actions and acknowledgement to understand how to bring design inputs into our designs from other people.
We consider project teams like a neighborhood and how this frame of mind can help our designs.
Dianna and Fred discussing a listener question about understanding stresses and mechanism of failures of a new design.
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Kirk and Fred discussing how a good reliability development process is to identify the weaknesses to improve a product including a recent fence repair at Kirk’s house.
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During product development, we’re consistently looking for ways to learn more about the product in order to make design decisions. Some of that comes from test.
What do we do when our test results are…surprising?
We talk about some next steps I typically take when tasked with surprises.
