Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The document by Nowlan and Heap
Part of keeping equipment operational is affecting repairs appropriately. Sometimes it makes sense to replace an element of some equipment before it fails, i.e. automobile tires as the tread wears. Sometimes is doesn’t make sense to repair a functioning unit as the result would be a system that is less reliable then before. [Read more…]
Two short questions to evaluate your knowledge of failure mechanisms (root causes) and common reliability models. The answers will be posted in a comment, later.
Which of the following failure root causes is most likely NOT due to power line variation (electronic-based product)?
A. Circuit design margin exceeded
B. Power dissipation
C. In-rush current response
D. Mechanical fatigue [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…]