Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Data and the analyses that use the data can be tricky to manage at best, let along extremely difficult.
In this last post of the series on using the maintenance data you have, Fred and James will answer many of the common questions asked about data and the analyses. [Read more…]
Life Data Analysis with only 2 FailuresHere’s a common problem. You have been tasked to peer into the future to predict when the next failure will occur.
Predictions are tough.
One way to approach this problem is to do a little analysis of the history of failures of the commonest or system. The problem looms larger when you have only two observed failures from the population of systems in questions.
While you can fit a straight line to two failures and account for all the systems that operated without failure, it is not very satisfactory. It is at best a crude estimate.
Let’s not consider calculating MTBF. That would not provide useful information as regular reader already know. So what can you do given just two failures to create a meaningful estimate of future failures? Let’s explore a couple of options. [Read more…]
Given Some Data, Do Data AnalysisLet’s say we have a set of numbers, {2.3, 4.2, 7.1, 7.6, 8.2, 8.4, 8.7, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1} and that is all we have at the moment.
How many ways could you analyze this set of numbers? We could plot it a few different ways, from a dot plot, stem-and-leaf plot, histogram, probability density plot, and probably a few other ways as well. We could calculate a few statistics about the dataset, such as mean, median, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, and so on. [Read more…]
In all aspects of engineering we only make improvements and innovation in technology by building on previous knowledge. Yet in the field of reliability engineering (and in particular electronics assemblies and systems), sharing the knowledge about field failures of electronics hardware and the true root causes is extremely limited. Without the ability to share data and teach what we know about the real causes of “un-reliability” in the field, it is more easily understood why the belief in the ability able to model and predict the future of electronics life and MTBF continue to dominate the field of electronics reliability
Customers experience product failures.
Understanding these failures that occur in the hands of customers is an essential undertaking. We need this information to identify increasing failure rates, component batch or assembly errors, or design mistakes. [Read more…]
In Katmandu, I visited a small pottery factory. There was a young man sitting at a potting wheel making candle stands. He didn’t measure anything and I doubt anyone did.
Based on experience and just looking at a finished item, he could tell if it was acceptable or not. That was good enough.