Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
We have “reliability” in our job title? Therefore, we must promote reliability across all our company products as our first priority?
If you believe that, then I believe you are a slave to reliability.
A project manager or design engineer comes to us and makes a proposal that would adversely impact product reliability. We’d reject it, yes?
Well, I believe, on both counts, we should first take a step back and review the alternatives. [Read more…]
We often present proposals and reports. We talk about the plan or results. We want funding, approval, or action. We need excellent presentation skills.
Excellent communication skills is often on job openings. It is not there by chance. Your ability to communicate well, especially via presentations is vital for your success and the success of your reliability program.
If your team, peers, or management do not understand your proposal or report when you present, few will take the time to read the material instead. Your presentation skills provide the incentive for action from your audience. Action you can guide using your presentation skills. [Read more…]
You have been put in charge of a program to study failure rates of brake pads. The place to start is a testing program that will generate data for analysis.
Testing programs should begin with a specific intent. This may be to characterize quality based failures, use life, or wear-out failure modes. When a test is complete it is easy to take all observed failures and use them in the data set to characterize the failure mode. This is a mistake.
Each of the study intents I described above can be attributed to wanting to understand a specific section of the life curve that is commonly represented by the “bathtub” curve. [Read more…]
Design of Experiments (DOE) is a phenomenal way to identify key relationships between variables and effects. It fully leverages statistics to not only identify these relationships in a compressed time frame but any “interactions” between variables that cause a specific effect. These interactions would not have been observed if experimentation was limited to adjusted one factor at a time (OFAT).
Engineers have been applying Prognostics to mechanical components for many years.
For example:
However, most industries building systems with mechanical components choose not to use prognostics because of the cost of the instrumentation within the product. Products that have on board “smarts” can choose to include diagnostics with less effort or expense. With advances in technology, the cost of the instrumentation is dropping. This not only means that adding the hardware to support advanced metrology is more feasible but that many of these components/systems may have already been added for other functionality and controls improvements in the product. It doesn’t take much brainstorming to find creative ways to use these existing sensory systems. [Read more…]
Reliability engineers are equipped with an arsenal of techniques (FTA, RBD, Markov, FMEA / FMECA, SIL) for reliability, availability, safety and maintainability analysis. However, it is not always clear when to use each technique.
In order to design a safe and reliable product, reliability engineering techniques should be integrated with the system design process. This fact is well known, and today many system engineering conferences include discussions regarding reliability and safety [1,2]. [Read more…]
Reliability goals are often communicated in Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) 40,000 hrs, Failure rate 0.00035, or percentage still functioning over time 99.98%. If you are not familiar with actually calculating these numbers they really don’t mean a lot. Are any of those above numbers good? bad? something we will even measure before release?
Are any of those above numbers good? bad? something we will even measure before release? [Read more…]
HASS doesn’t break stuff like HALT. HASS is like a good physical examination from a doctor: It gives you the thumbs up or thumbs down on health based on a quick and thorough examination. But a good thorough examination is possible because of research, education, and practice.
[Read more…]
There are many paths to becoming a reliability engineer.
If you are good with statistics, enjoy the detective work of failure analysis, or simply want to create a durable long lasting product, you likely found yourself in a reliability engineering role.
A science or engineering background is a great start. Time spent working with a design or maintenance team certainly help. An advanced degree in reliability engineering is another path.
The element that is often missing as a precursor become starting a career in reliability is excellent soft skills. We know the engineering and science stuff. The formulas, the testing, the data analysis. We can get stuff done in the lab or on the shop floor.
Yet to become an exceptional reliability engineer, or any type of engineer, add the ability to communicate well. Add the ability to get your point across and to wield influence to help others understand and accept your proposals, ideas, and results. [Read more…]
Why do so few product development programs make that connection between the product specification document content and the released product? It seems to be such a common thing that these two don’t connect that organizations don’t even bother to review or analyze this after release.
The mindset at that point seems to be:
I was in a meeting recently with a customer team. It was on-site with 12 people ranging from mid-level engineers to upper management. Someone defended me earlier in the meeting by saying “Well, he did write a book on it!” Which was nice and kinda cool to hear someone say. But this lead to a later comeback by a crusty, principle engineer, 40 years under his belt, boat captain from “Jaws” kind of guy. “If we can buy your book then why do we need you?”
I took a moment. I knew that not responding wasn’t what I wanted to do but had to tread carefully because a poorly crafted response could easily sound arrogant. This is what I responded with… [Read more…]
Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.
While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]
We are all familiar with the base of our car warranties being in both months and miles. 
Some of that is that they want a definitive end to all warranty periods. But another reason is you can’t just boil down all aging factors to one stress. In a product development program, we are always under pressure to keep all activities as short as possible. Accelerated Life Testing ALT can loose almost all of it’s value when not executed with care. [Read more…]
Analyzing and visualizing data that is related to equipment wear-out (fatigue stage) over a specific time span is a challenge. Analyzing systems, equipment and components exposed to spectrum loading as opposed to uniform cyclical loading that span years or decades or centuries requires a special approach. Think of roads, bridges and other assets with long life spans that are susceptible to wear out mechanisms caused by external and internal loads, varying load durations, temperature swings and corrosion. [Read more…]
This video clip looks like a disaster but is actually a visualization of precision reliability engineering………. right after a disaster . [Read more…]
