Abstract

Carl and Fred discussing the underlying mechanisms of failure, and how they impact our analysis and understanding of reliability.

Key Points

Join Carl and Fred as they discuss the broad subject of failure mechanisms. Many of the tools of reliability, such as FMEA, RCA, design guidelines, test design, interpreting field failures, require understanding mechanisms of failure.

Topics include:

• What are mechanisms of failure?
• Which reliablity methods depend on knowlege of underlying failure mechanisms for their application?
• Who needs to know about mechanisms of failure?
• How deeply do you need to know mechanisms of failure?
• DfR requires an understanding of failure mechanisms well enough to know how to influence the reliablity of the design.
• Reliability engineers need to talk the langauge of how things fail, so they can guide the design team to achieve reliability.
• Reliability statistics vs design for reliability.
• Every failure contains clues of the mechanism, and this is “gold”!
• Reliability can be a catalyst to the organization to have conversations about failure.
• If you understand how things fail, you can design them to be robust.
• Think: “what precipates failure?”
• Don’t forget the human side. How could the mechanism of failure have been avoided?
• Work towards a culture that allows and encourages open to critique by others.
• General knowledge of all types of failure mechnisms is good. Specialized knowledge of selected failure mechinsims is also good.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

SOR 708 How Well to Know Failure MechanismsCarl S. Carlson

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