Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Let us address your reliability engineering questions. Gain the experience of your peers and accelerate the improvement of your program and career.
Listen, comment, send questions, join the discussion.
Chris and Fred discuss questions that are easy to ask … but hard to answer. And these questions are often hard to answer because the person asking the question hasn’t thought about the REAL question they are trying to answer. So how many samples do I need for everything to be OK???
ᐅ Play Episode
Carl and Fred discussing the future of the field of reliability engineering, including where we have been and where we are going.
ᐅ Play Episode
Carl and Fred discussing unusual and interesting reliability projects that cross disciplines.
ᐅ Play Episode
Kirk and Fred discussing the challenge of getting a proposal for new testing (i.e HALT) accepted.
ᐅ Play Episode
Kirk and Fred discussing the challenge of when to end efforts in troubleshooting a failure.
ᐅ Play Episode
Chris and Fred discuss how statistics, mechanisms, and other technical words that come from ‘reliability engineering’ in contrast to softer terms like ‘facilitation.’ This comes from discussions Chris has had during his Statistical Process Control (SPC) course that he has run previously. So what is the big deal about these words? Well … you can know everything there is to know about statistics and failure mechanisms – but if you can’t make things better then it is all for nothing!
ᐅ Play Episode
Chris and Fred discuss a ‘common slope assumption’ … which is something that only those of you with reliability engineering experience will have heard about. This is all about what we called ‘accelerated life testing’ where we increase stresses to accelerate failure. And software that is used to model accelerated life testing. Keen to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
ᐅ Play Episode
Carl and Fred having a new conversation about the age-old topic of key characteristics, and how they are used to improve products and processes.
ᐅ Play Episode
Carl and Fred discussing the value of questioning in the process of learning and personal growth. Students and instructors should question each other as part of learning, engineering teams should question each other as part of achieving consensus.
ᐅ Play Episode
Kirk and Fred discussing the article Kirk wrote titled “Why the Drain in the Bathtub Curve Matters” (see link in notes) about how technological obsolescence, and not product failures are the cause that cause many products to be retired or replaced.
ᐅ Play Episode
Kirk and Fred discussing how much of reliability engineering is devoted to testing and what other functions should a reliability engineer do.
ᐅ Play Episode
Carl and Fred discussing the origin and meaning of the reliability “bathtub” curve, and why it is not useful as a visual analogy.
ᐅ Play Episode
Kirk and Fred discuss the relationship between FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis) and HALT (Highly Accelerated Limit Test)
ᐅ Play Episode
Kirk and Fred discuss misunderstandings of the limit testing and believing it’s “just breaking it”
ᐅ Play Episode
Carl and Fred discussing the planning that goes into any reliability program.
ᐅ Play Episode
