field failure Archives - Accendo Reliability

3 Ways to Provide Field Reliability Feedback to the Design Team

By the time a product fails in the field, the design team is focused on the next design.

They are looking to the future and not looking for field reliability feedback. We know that each failure contains valuable information.

We, as reliability professionals, often work to create as much useful information concerning failure modes and mechanisms as possible. We want to improve the design.

Yet, what happens when the design team has moved on to the next project? When the expertise to effectively make changes to the design to improve product reliability performance is no longer paid to work on the previous design?

What can you do to engage the right people to implement the necessary changes?

Here are a few ideas that I’ve seen used to effectively make good use of field failures to create meaningful field reliability feedback. [Read more…]

by Kirk Gray Leave a Comment

Required Case History for Reliability Engineers

One for the (Reliability) Books

The GM Ignition switch failure case history should be required reading for all reliability engineers.

It is rare to have insight into any internal company history of serious electronic and electromechanical failures. Failure analysis and the causes of electronics or electromechanical systems failure can be a difficult investigation for any manufacturing company. Disclosure of the history and data is rarely if ever published due to the potential liability and litigation costs as well as loss of reputation for reliability and safety.

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by Kirk Gray Leave a Comment

Why the Drain in the Bathtub Curve Matters

Most reliability engineers are familiar with the life cycle bathtub curve, the shape of the hazard rate or risks of failure of a electronic product over time. A typical electronic’s life cycle bathtub curve is shown in figure 1. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 9 Comments

Field Data and 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…]

by Kirk Gray 4 Comments

No Evidence of Correlation: Field failures and Traditional Reliability Engineering

Historically Reliability Engineering of Electronics has been dominated by the belief that 1) The life or percentage of complex hardware failures that occurs over time can be estimated, predicted, or modeled and 2) Reliability of electronic systems can be calculated or estimated through statistical and probabilistic methods to improve hardware reliability. The amazing thing about this is that during the many decades that reliabilityengineers have been taught this and believe that this is true, there is little if any empirical field data from the vast majority of verified failures that shows any correlation with calculated predictions of failure rates.
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