Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Production processes come to a grinding halt when equipment breaks down. This results in production delays, costs incurred to fix the machine, and opportunity costs. The production process cannot proceed until the maintenance activity on the faulty machine is complete — unless you have provisioned equipment redundancy. [Read more…]
In the article Calculating Network Reliability the lack of published analytical solution for dual-ring network reliability was highlighted. This article provides a neat solution and further challenges readers to offer their proof or prior publication reference. The solution and the author’s general proof will be presented at RAMS 2020.
I have worked in the field of reliability for a good many years. I have presented both beginner and advanced reliability engineering courses. I have even read several books. 🙂 But, across all this, component redundancy has never been explained beyond simple serial and parallel configurations.
So, it was a shock to my system to be presented with a scenario that couldn’t be solved using a simple parallel system.
My previous work had challenged me only as far as:
But now I was being challenged by a network that was none of these.
Speaking reliability-wise, parallel, means any of the elements in parallel structure permit the system to function. This does not mean they are physically parallel (in all cases), as capacitors in parallel provide a specific behavior in the circuit and if one capacitor fails that system might fail.
In this simple drawing, there are n components in parallel and any one component is needed for the system to function. [Read more…]