Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
This article covers the operation of steam traps and how they work. Steam is a greatly used medium. Its use ranges from heating process and domestic fluids through to driving turbines by the expansion of the vapour. Yet the steam trap at the bottom of a drop leg is easily forgotten. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
What is risk? Think about it before you leap to answer. Do we really know and understand risk? Some facts to consider:
Risk management requires that you constantly monitor recognized risks and continue to scan for new risks. This process cannot be accomplished with a ‘one and done’ mindset. Risk needs to be looked at in three dimensions and perhaps even four dimensions to begin to understand the “touchpoints” and aggregation of risk, potential to cascade, conflate and/or come to a confluence. [Read more…]
The quality triangle is an admission that every project has design constraints. Note that reliability is rarely listed directly within the triangle, yet reliability does impact each element of the triad.
In a world where the design team is beset with numerous design for X priorities, understanding how reliability related to the top three and most common set of constraints is imperative.
For any set of priorities, you should be able to convey how addressing reliability performance in the design and assembly process impacts those priorities. Addressing reliability can improve quality, reduce the risk of launch delays, and reduce the cost of a product. All this and improve customer satisfaction as well.
Let’s explore a few ways you can connect reliability priorities to the common quality triangle priorities. [Read more…]
While previous articles focused on requirements writing, another element of products requirements is design constraints.
A design constraint might not be a requirement in the purest sense, but must be accommodated in product requirements (and, ideally, identified as such). Design constraints almost always make their way into product requirements.
Let’s use a simple example whereby a specific housing material is specified (a polyester thermoplastic elastomer).
The requirement might simply be: “The housing material shall be made of a polyester thermoplastic elastomer”. The PRD is then provided to the designer, essentially telling him he must use this material.
I’ve teamed up with Skylar Wooden, a Technical Writer, and Katie Butler, a CPA, the ladies behind Pare and Flourish to bring you some technical writing tips for engineers. 
Engineers are incredibly knowledgeable people. You understand how to design and build the most complex of structures. You analyze and evaluate intricate data. But, many engineers miss one of the most important aspects of any profession—explaining your work to others. Whether it’s to tell someone how to perform a task, or report on a project to a superior, relaying information is just as critical as knowing the information.
As an engineer, you can offer your expertise in two ways: verbal or written communication. You likely deal with the verbal aspect of this on a daily basis when you answer questions, explain a process, or even talk about your job with your friends. So, how often are you writing? [Read more…]
Intuitively, the emphasis in reliability to achieve a reduction in warranty and in-service costs results in some minimal increase in development and manufacturing costs. However, use of the proper techniques during the proper life cycle phase will help to minimize total life cycle cost (LCC).
To minimize total LCC, your organization should do two things:
We make decisions every day. Our project teams and organizations have many individuals making decisions every day. Most of these decisions have little to do with product reliability, yet a surprising number of design, marketing, production, and customer care decisions that have a direct impact on product reliability performance.
As a reliability professional, do you work to make better decisions? Do you work to enable the individuals designing, producing, marketing, etc your organization’s products to make better decisions concerning reliability?
If not, why?
Let’s outline a few ways to estimate the value to you and your organization to improve decision making concerning reliability. [Read more…]
I’ve been told that humor, especially New York sarcasm doesn’t go over too well on LinkedIn. That as a regular contributor of articles, blog postings and hopefully useful updates one should try avoid attempting to use humor as a teaching tool.
Well those who know me well know I also don’t always follow the advice of those who somehow believe we all learn the same way, think the same way and therefore do things the same way. I’m a guy who believes that while common sense might not be that common, when you explain why something makes sense most of the audience will get it. For the others who still don’t understand I of course bring data.
Recognizing the heartbeat of product development will allow organizations to make the most of their resources. Using the right tools, at the right time, will lead to improved designs. This video talks in detail about what the heartbeat is made up of.
A Series of Unfortunate MTBF AssumptionsThe calculation of MTBF results in a larger number if we make a series of MTBF assumptions. We just need more time in the operating hours and fewer failures in the count of failures.
While we really want to understand the reliability performance of field units, we often make a series of small assumptions that impact the accuracy of MTBF estimates.
Here are just a few of these MTBF assumptions that I’ve seen and in some cases nearly all of them with one team. Reliability data has useful information is we gather and treat it well. [Read more…]
Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
A defense company I worked for wanted to get into the Sonobuoy business. At the time, one company dominated the market and usually received the largest share of the Navy contract. A couple of other suppliers got the balance of the production quantity to keep it a competitive business.
My company developed a win strategy based on a ¼ scale prototype and purposely under bidding the competition. It worked. They won the largest piece of the production contract. [Read more…]
When in solution (dissolved in water) the molecules of an acid or a base dissociate (disunite) into a mix of component parts and the full molecule. The components are electrically charged + or – ions. Ions are unstable and ‘want’ to bond chemically to become stable. In strong acids and bases many ions are present, making them reactive and dangerous. [Read more…]
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Binomial distribution is discrete. This short article focuses on 4 formulas of the Binomial Distribution.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
The Plan: Saturday and Sunday was skiing in Vermont with the family, back Sunday night, everyone off to school Monday morning, then to the airport to get to Miami, Tuesday and Wed meetings down there, then fly out Wed night so I’m back to teach classes Thur and Fri here in Boston. Easy Peesie!
Actual: Finish ski trip feel a little “strange” on flight down to Miami, slight chills. Tuesday do meetings just barely, Tuesday night it hits like a freight train, The Flu, or Malaria, Aliens. On Wednesday the freight train had fully passed over me so it stopped and spent Wed backing up over me again. Thursday it went forward again over a pile of human jello. I’m not flying out for the clases on Thur and Fri, or anytime soon for that matter. Just getting home is my mission for the week.
Managing requirements for complex systems can be challenging, however, establishing a hierarchical framework of key questions (answered at each layer of the hierarchy) can be quite helpful.
While some regulatory authorities (such as the FAA) may require various layers of documentation and traceability, this article isn’t necessarily advocating a bureaucratic development process. The process can be scaled based on the complexity of your system, your ability to model it’s (system) design performance and/or based on the amount of product development risk the organization is willing to assume. [Read more…]
