Fundamentals of Stress-Strength Analysis

podcast episode

If your product is stronger than the applied stress, it should work. The concept of the stress/strength relationship is well known, yet did you know both stress and strength change over time? Let’s use the best information and tools for this analysis.

The key idea of stress/strength or derating for electrical engineers is to design a product using materials and components that will have the suitable strength to withstand the stress condition experienced over the expected duration of use. The term, margin, refers to the distance between the minimum strength to expected maximum stress. We know that when there is little or no margin, failures are more likely to occur.

Let’s talk about the information necessary to understand the expected stress, the strength, along with how both will change over time. There are a number of ways to estimate failure rates depending on what data you have available. The better your data, the better your estimates.

The engineers doing the design work select the materials and components and need the best available understanding of stress and strength, and how they change over time, in order to design in reliability right from the start. While desirable to get data for every material type and component along with every possible applied stresses, that just isn’t feasible. So let’s also talk about a few strategies to narrow down the focus to the critical few that require the best possible data for a stress/strength analysis.

As always, this webinar will be very interactive, with plenty of prompts for your comments and questions. So bring your questions and problems around applying stress/strength concepts. Let’s talk about how you can improve your product’s design with a better analysis.

This Accendo Reliability webinar originally broadcast on 25 September 2018.