Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
This article is a basic introduction to the mechanism of metal fatigue failure where parts break after a period of time in service. Explanations of accepted theories are provided and relevant design practices to reduce metal fatigue are presented and explained. [Read more…]
Hi Fred,
I would take this opportunity to ask the reliability guru about bathtub curve for hardware reliability. I am running 27 units for life test for a million cycles around 555 hours. I have one failure at 300,000 cycles, and the rest of the units are running fine. Would this be classified as an early life failure? Also, how do I make a determination of when the early life failure time interval ends and constant failure rate starts in this example based on failure rate of remaining units? Thanks. [Read more…]
Reading a datasheet to determine a reliability value may take some investigative work. Whenever I see a fit rate based on failure-free testing, I am curious about how they did the testing and the calculations. [Read more…]
Reaching for a goal may include taking some risks. In reliability testing, we are often limited by the number of samples available for testing. And, in the case where time is available or the acceleration factor is high we can take advantage of testing longer. [Read more…]