Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
The concept of Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD) is also known as Reliability Modeling or Reliability, Availability, Maintainability (RAM) analysis. With RAM models, the interaction of large, complex, and multi-layered systems can be analyzed using Monte Carlo simulation methods. This help quantify the output of the entire system with greater accuracy than other estimating tools or methods. [Read more…]
Using shapes as a deceptive communication practice is an old trick used for manipulation by one side of an argument. The good news is that Fortune gets it right in its annual publication of Fortune 500 companies. Fortune correctly uses two-dimensional shapes (circles) to depict one-dimensional values such as annual revenues. We’ll discuss this data visualization trick in this brief article.
Suppose your total revenues were $100 per month, and your leading competitor had total revenues of $10 per month. Clearly, you are ten times stronger from a total revenue perspective from your competitor. A one-dimensional graph, such as a bar chart, makes an honest visual representation of the difference.
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Hopefully, you have already seen that utilizing R for engineering can unlock a host of powerful tools and techniques and give you the power of data visualization.
In using R, you will likely work with various objects (data files, scripts, analyses, reports etc.). As with other things, creating structure for how you accomplish things in R can be important for both effectiveness and efficiency.
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In the previous article, P-F Curve was used to understand the Remaining useful life (RUL) of an asset. RUL can be estimated at any time during the asset’s life, but it’s opportune to calculate RUL at the time ‘t’ when the asset shows signs of an impending failure. In the P-F Curve terminology the point at which the asset shows signs of failure is called the Potential Failure Point (Pf), which can also be stated as the time of anomalous behavior. The exercise of detecting anomalous behavior is called “Anomaly Detection (AD)”.
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When equipment working parts are operated within their precision quality standard zones, world-class reliability is guaranteed.
The figures below demonstrates the importance of setting precision quality standards to achieve outstanding equipment reliability. It comes from a conference presentation on the production equipment reliability improvement in a steel mill in Australia.
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This article is the sixth of fourteen parts to our risk management series. The series will be taking a look at the risk management guidelines under the ISO 31000 Standard to help you better understand them and how they relate to your own risk management activities. In doing so, we’ll be walking through the core aspects of the Standard and giving you practical guidance on how to implement it.
In previous articles we’ve looked at the core elements of the risk management framework, as well as the role of leadership and commitment, integration, design and implementation more specifically. In this article, we’ll be looking at how to effectively evaluate your organisation’s risk management framework.
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Humans are often so focused on the complex, that the simple gets overlooked. Even as technology and our equipment gets more complex, we need to be firmly rooted in the basics of maintenance and reliability.
That’s one reasons why the first step of RCM is so important.
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Earlier this year I was in Seoul and got a chance to see Avatar 4D.
What’s the 4th dimension? Moving seats, wind, water sprinkling, lasers, and synthetic smells used to enhance the movie experience.
That made me wonder, with so much advances in media/entertainment, why is most safety training so dull?
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Recently, there has been an influx of Industry 4.0 companies promising their product/application would help predict the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a physical asset. Each uses a mix of machine learning algorithms to estimate the RUL based on the data available. This is their value proposition. But what is this ‘life’?
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This is an example of the value of identifying the variability in your business processes and removing them before spending money on new capital works. A simple production rate distribution bar chart shows you whether you have a “hidden factory” and how big it is.
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What does the future of any profession mean? Underdetermined future events (e.eg. COVID-19)? Future proof job? Work /family balance? Health at a later date? Secure retirement? It is all of the above and that is why you need to choose the right profession for you.
The future of the project management profession is bright and strong for a long time to come.
[Read more…]In the world of reliability engineering, ensuring the long-term dependability and safety of components is of paramount importance. Nondestructive Testing (NDT) technologies have emerged as indispensable tools for reliability professionals in various industries, including aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, and power generation. By enabling the inspection and evaluation of materials and components without causing damage, NDT techniques play a crucial role in enhancing short and long-term reliability.
In this blog post, we will explore several NDT technologies and how they contribute to improving component reliability.
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The mining industry in Australia has for some time been plagued by high turnover in its skilled maintenance workforce. The tough lifestyle and remote/regional locations are some of the main contributing causes, and have been for years, however other industries of employment offering competitive wages and a better lifestyle have in the recent years pulled the workforce from mining, leaving a void of labor numbers behind that have proved difficult to fill.
The common query, “How do I keep equipment reliability up, even with high turnover?” prompts a standardized response from most maintenance professionals – proceduralize the maintenance system to reduce variability and maintain consistent output. However, while this approach bears truth, it overlooks a substantial aspect…
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Robert G. Albion was a notable historian of maritime affairs. He taught at Princeton and Harvard, and was one of the US Navy’s chief historians during World War II. In one of his books, Albion examined how timber management in Britain affected naval shipbuilding and maintenance policies.
In the late 1700s, the British Empire was more dependent on the navy for power projection, home defense, and security of maritime trade. In the age of sail, the average ship life was between 10 and 20 years. In the 17th century, British naval ships lasted 25-30 years. Albion found their average service life to be only 13 years in 1771. By 1792, service life fell to 12 years. In the Napoleonic period, the lifespan fell to only 8 years.
“The ‘life’ or duration of a ship was reckoned from the date of her launching to the time when her condition necessitated repairs as costly as the construction of a new ship.” The British determined service life by a basic level of repair analysis.
“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
– Morpheus to Neo in the movie The Matrix.
