Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
I am a parent of two young children. As a result of my experiences as a mom, I feel that parents make great Reliability Engineers because there are so many shared skill sets. Please enjoy this lighthearted comparison to start your week out with a little humor.
First, I have to point out the development of a brand new Reliability Engineer requires the same skills of lubrication and vibration that the conception of a child requires. [Read more…]
In my last article, RCA Templates Use or not?, I discussed templates and suggested that while beneficial for many things, they may not provide as much value for those doing RCA’s. This is because for any specific effect, the variability in the cause tree is significant and difficult to predict. This doesn’t mean that there are no options to utilize templates to help speed up the process, but perhaps not in the way that people might be used to. [Read more…]
Finding solutions is reliability engineering too.
Have you noticed that finding solutions often requires just the right question, the proper framing of the issue, the query that reveals the problem and solution?
One of the best ways to lead a team and provide a focus on reliability performance is to ask the right questions.
Understanding objectives, risks, and failures is what we primarily do as reliability professionals. We work with teams to achieve or improve reliability performance.
We ask questions. [Read more…]
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.
A plan is a guide or roadmap for intended action.
A reliability plan is also a collection of specific tasks and milestones and enhanced with a rationale to allow the entire team fully understand their role accomplishing the reliability objectives.
The plan is a way to achieve the desired business objectives. Meaning the product is reliable enough to meet customer expectations, minimize warranty expenses, and garner market acceptance. The plan is just a plan, it is the accomplishment of the tasks, the decision which improves the design, the signals monitored that stabilize the supply chain and assembly process, that make the difference.
A plan without action is not worth the effort. [Read more…]
We talk about reliability because it matters. The ability to estimate reliability allows us to make design and development decisions. The ability to monitor reliability allows us to adjust the design, suppliers or expectations about a product. [Read more…]
Each of us have seen product life or component reliability claims on product literature or data sheets. We may even have received such claims stated as goals and been asked to support the claim with some form of an experiment. Standards bodies from ANSI, BSI, ISO, IEC, and others from around the world provide standard methods for testing products. This includes product life testing in some cases. [Read more…]
In light of the International Day of Failure, Oct 13th, let’s consider failure from a reliability engineer’s point of view. We work to understand and avoid product failures. When a product fails to deliver the desired performance attribute it is tossed away, returned, replaced, repaired, or tolerated. This may occur before or after the value of the product has been achieved. [Read more…]
Reliability, maintainability, availability, or the ‘ilities’ are common in our language with reference to products, services, equipment, and people. Joe is regularly available for the meeting; We can count on (depend or rely) Sara to finish the report on time; My car starts every morning without fail; and many more. What is meant with these concepts and specifically how do we manage achieving and sustaining business objectives related to these ‘ility’ concepts? The purpose of this short paper [Read more…]
The lognormal distribution has two parameters, μ, and σ. These are not the same as mean and standard deviation, which is the subject of another post, yet they do describe the distribution, including the reliability function. [Read more…]
Some many years ago I ran across a data sheet for a cooling fan (used to cool a desktop computer, for example) that listed the fan’s life as 50,000 hours MTBF. The big bold lettering was on the data sheet and was the only use of bold on the entire data sheet. One couldn’t miss it. The computers we used these fans within had a one year warranty, plus were expected to operate for a home computer user for about 5 years. Thus, we would expect the fan to also operate for five years without failure. [Read more…]
Just answered a question on where to find reliability engineering training on basics and statistics. There are plenty of options and below I’m listing just where to find the many, many options available to you. [Read more…]
Hello, can anyone advise me how to calculate temperature acceleration factor for a complex system including cards, RF elements, cables, motors and moving parts? Is the Arrhenius model valid for such systems, or there are more precise models? Thank you! [Read more…]
Just a short post to point to a newly added paper to the reference section. A few years ago I recalled seeing a paper that studied the difference to expect between various parts count methods and actual results. [Read more…]
As 12%* of the CRE exam, this is a major section, yet not a very difficult one. There are three basic areas:
If you’ve ever needed to secure funding or samples for a reliability test or had to respond to customer field returns, then you probably already understand the value of reliability.
In some businesses, product reliability is critical to the product’s success. Some businesses strive to be the leading ‘reliable’ producer in the market. [Read more…]