What is Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT)?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Some of you have heard of HALT (and I don’t mean someone asking you to stop). HALT is a very powerful form of testing to really help us improve the robustness and reliability of new products. So what is HALT? HALT is a targeted test strategy to stress your amazing new product to (and beyond) it’s limits. Which means HALT will break your product (or prototype). Over and over again. Some people ask ‘so what … of course it was going to break when you pushed it that hard?’ But there is a method to this madness. And many organizations have used HALT to create amazing new products that are robust and reliable very quickly (with competitors struggling to understand why). Want to learn more? See you at this webinar!
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The State of Reliability Education

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

We have plenty of options to learn reliability engineering—books, magazines, newsletters, conferences, seminars, etc. We have options. Depending on what you want to know, some options are better than others. Likewise, some options are better than others, depending on what you want to share.

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What is Accelerated Life Testing or ALT?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Sounds simple … right? We simply test faster! Great! But what does this get us? Many organizations are faced with a dilemma when it comes to testing to MEASURE reliability. If we test an amazing new product in ‘at use’ conditions, it might take many years before it will fail. This is time we simply don’t have when it comes to product development. So how do we test faster? One of the more obvious answers is to increase the stress. Turn the temperature up. Increase the vibration. Use more voltage. But how do we get this right? How can we know that (for example) one week of accelerated testing is equivalent to 10 years of actual use? This webinar will help introduce you to the idea of Accelerated Life Testing or ALT to help you and your organization make reliability testing a reality.
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Design for Reliability – Stressors

podcast episode with speaker Michael Pfeifer

Any product is a collection of materials that have been engineered, shaped, and modified to become components and joints (e.g. weld and braze joints). The materials can degrade due to exposure to use conditions – steel screws corrode when exposed to water, some plastics become brittle when exposed to sunlight, and coatings on surfaces can wear away.

Components and joints will stop functioning as required if their materials degrade too much. This is a problem if it leads to a reduction or loss of product performance before the end of a product’s expected life.

Identifying the conditions to which materials are exposed and selecting materials that can withstand the exposure is a critical part of designing products that have good reliability.

During this event, I will discuss the identification of the conditions that can cause materials to degrade. [Read more…]

Why Redundant Systems Aren’t Always Redundant

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Redundancy has continually proven to not always be redundant. Whether it be the Fukushima nuclear power plant or United Airlines Flight 232, additional components or subsystems that are supposed to take over when others have failed don’t always work. Why is that? There are quite a few reasons … many of which we already know about. But time and time again, otherwise smart people choose to ignore what we know about how to REALLY make things redundant in order to save costs, save thinking, or otherwise confuse efforts with outcomes. In this webinar, we will look at how redundancy is described in textbooks … and how it can go wrong in the real world.
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Reliability Occurs at the Point of Decision

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

The reliability performance of a product or system exists because the decisions that occurred during the creation of the product establish how well an item will survive without failure. The choice of material or finish or technologies along with all the other decisions involved define how well a product performs, including its reliability. [Read more…]

What is the Weibull Distribution?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Whether you are new to reliability or a veteran, you have probably heard about the Weibull distribution. It has almost mythical status amongst those who conduct reliability data analysis … or in other words – turning a jumble of dots (data points) into information that actually means something. So why do we ‘worship’ the Weibull distribution? What is so special about it? Whether you have been doing this for a long time or five minutes, you will get something out of this webinar that looks at one of the most popular tools for reliability analysis.
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Focus on Failure Mechanisms

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

In my opinion, as I do not know if this is true or not, every product or system failure has a cause. Causes are not exactly the same as what we call ‘failure mechanisms’, yet they are related in many cases. One more term to consider is ‘failure mode’ which is the symptoms or results of a failure. [Read more…]

What is a ‘Fault Tree’?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

If you have spent any amount of time doing reliability engineering stuff, you will probably have heard of this thing called a ‘fault tree.’ You may have even used fault trees a lot. But it is amazing how many different reliability engineers have different ideas about how to best use a fault tree. Some think fault trees are strictly used to work out which combinations of components need to fail in order for the system to fail (system reliability modelling). Others think fault trees are really useful for helping us work out what the causes of failure are (root cause analysis). Both people are right. So why do we get these competing schools of thought? Join us for this webinar to learn more about how fault trees can help you … regardless of what you are trying to achieve.
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Being a Great Reliability Engineer

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

What is it that makes the difference between good and great related to reliability engineers? What is the magic element that separates those that can carry out tasks such as facilitating an FMEA or designing and analyzing an ALT from those that impact an organization’s culture? A good impact that improves the organization’s ability to create reliable products.

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What do you see in a ‘Probability’ Plot?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Some of you might have heard about probability plots … like Weibull plots. Some of you might not. A Weibull plot is a really useful way of quickly ‘looking’ at data and being able to ‘see’ really useful things. This could be seeing that the rate of failure of a system is decreasing over time … which usually means there are manufacturing defects. It could be seeing that the rate of failure of a system is increasing over time … which means the system is accumulating damage or wearing out. And lots of other things. So let’s look at a different sort of ‘probability’ plot … and see what we can work out from it. And that means working out what we need to do to improve reliability. Join this webinar if you want to learn how to see really useful things in lines that you might not have appreciated in the past.
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Practical Measurement Systems Analysis for Design – Work Smarter

podcast episode with speaker Rob Schubert

Gage R&R – this is mainly a quality tool, where 10% is a pass and 10-30% is “marginal.” What does that mean, or even better yet, how can I use gage R&R to provide meaningful results in a design environment where there are no specifications? In 30 minutes we will discuss how you can calculate Gage discrimination – the more useful result for a design situation, and even how to use it for destructive reliability tests.
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Confidence in Reliability

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Reliability is a measure of your product or system. Confidence is a measure of you. But we often forget this. We often subject our new product, system or service to test after test until it reaches this thing called ‘required statistical confidence.’ But this is often an illusion. Which is great! Because if statistical confidence is often not ‘real’ confidence, then we don’t always have to resort to statistics to get confidence. In fact, those of us who exclusively rely on statistics are usually those who lack confidence in the product, system or service and need a security blanket to make them feel OK. This webinar talks about confidence from the perspective of the ‘process owner.’ The design team lead. The CTO. The junior engineer. And how you can get a much healthier version of confidence through the way we design and produce our ‘things’ so that when it comes time to test … we are (justifiably) supremely confident that we will absolutely dominate whatever statistical testing hurdle can be thrown our way. And this sometimes means we don’t need to deal with statistics at all!
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Reliability and Maintenance

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

Both reliability and maintenance activities work to reduce failures and downtime. Perfect reliability of a system would eliminate the need for maintenance. Perfect maintenance would keep even poorly designed (reliability-wise) operating.

Together the work of reliability and maintenance professional can achieve more then each team working separately. Each brings a set of insights and skills to the conversation. Working together means improving the design of a system so it’s easier to maintain. It also means the day to day observations the maintenance teams make provides meaningful information to the reliability team.

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Basic Mathematical Symbols and Stuff

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

OK … we have all been there. We have all sat in some statistical presentation or read a document that contains mathematical symbols and statistical hieroglyphics that we don’t understand. And we pretend we do understand just so we don’t embarrass ourselves. And the people we don’t want to embarrass ourselves in front of are usually also pretending to understand those symbols and hieroglyphics as well. This webinar is a light (re)introduction into common mathematical symbols used in many engineering scenarios … including reliability. [Read more…]