Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A product or system may fail for many different reasons.
One cause is a faulty part. A component is susceptible to failure when either improperly used in the design or is a damaged or flawed component. [Read more…]
What is reliability management? Reliability Engineering? Would a product design or an organization benefit with a focus on reliability management and engineering? What is the value of a focus on reliability?
Any organization, that develops and produces products, has resource limits. It may be talent, capabilities, time, funding, or some combination of these.
Yet, the goal to create a product that meets customer expectations includes the concept of product reliability. The product should provide the expected functions over time, without failure. This expected product reliability occurs, even if the design requirements and advertising do not explicitly mention product reliability. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
As the world approaches 7 billion in population this year, there is an ever-increasing demand for food, energy and a voice in how things are run. How do these changes affect business continuity planners, you may be asking?
The simple answer is, they will have far-reaching effects on how business continuity planning is conducted.
No longer can we be satisfied with the assurance that our “hot site” is available, or that we can maintain business operations in the face of a pandemic; or that we can deal with the aftermath of a natural disaster. [Read more…]
What readers will learn in this article:
Dusty surroundings are one of the most difficult environments for bearings.
In equipment handling powders or in processes generating dust the protection of bearings against contamination by fine particles requires special consideration. [Read more…]
Most everyone agrees that improving a product or process reliability is a good thing. It’s good for customers, factories, and our business. And sometimes it’s difficult to answer the question,
‘What is the value of that reliability activity?’
What if your boss asks you what value you provide to the organization? Your answer may to harder to compose than you think.
How would you quantify your skills, experience, and knowledge and your role within the complex formal and informal working environments? [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Introduction
There exists an overabundance of guidance for conducting risk assessments. Yet, it seems that we still have difficulty in getting risk assessments to reflect the appropriate level of concern for the identified risks that we are assessing. We also tend to view risk in relation to the place where we are employed and the industry that we work in. When we look at risk assessment from this perspective it should be clear that we are missing the point precisely, or at best, are being too narrowly focused, when it comes to assessing risk for our organizations. [Read more…]
What readers will learn in this article:
For the effective flow of a cohesive (sticks to itself) product, a chute must be designed to maintain momentum & velocity. [Read more…]
When products were crafted one at a time, the design and manufacturing process was often done by the same person. The craftsman would design and build a chest of drawers or carriage.
Some trades would employ apprentices to learn the craft, which included design. Larger projects may include an architect or lead designer along with a team of engineers.
Yet the shop or site for the railroad engineer or bridge was not far allowing close communication between the ironsmith and design team. [Read more…]
Reliability is not the sole responsibility of the reliability engineer but results from nearly everyone in an organization making decisions that move toward the desired product reliability performance.
As a reliability professional, I often find it necessary to explore ways to leverage my knowledge of these areas to change the culture within an organization to create a sustainable program that achieves reliable products time and again. [Read more…]
I’ve often said, “reliability occurs at the point of decision.”
At the point of design during the design process. At each and every decision.
The design team of engineers establishes the bulk of the reliability capability early in the design process. The team’s decisions about materials or shape, concerning inventions or outsourcing, about how and where to build the product, and many more decisions impact the final product’s reliability performance.
Reliability is designed into the product right from the start. [Read more…]
What readers will learn in this article.
When there is a need to determine a new service duty for a centrifugal pump, and no performance curves are available, the recommended method is to use the Similarity Laws. These laws are derived by the use of [Read more…]
Early in my career, I worked for an unreasonable person.
He wanted us, his engineering staff, to show him the data. He wanted us to gather, monitor, analyze and display data regularly. Anytime we needed approval, funding, or resources he wanted to see the data. [Read more…]
One aspect of HALT, (a test to find weaknesses and reliability risks empirically), is the difficulty for many engineers that are new to the HALT- that it guarantees that the maximum or recommended operating environmental specifications for the system and components under test will be exceeded, and failures beyond spec are potentially relevant to field reliability. [Read more…]
Let’s start by understanding the difference between engineers and engineering designers.
The work we do as reliability engineers may require a different approach when working with these different types of engineers. [Read more…]
Reliability is not the only concern when building a system.
Let’s consider a passenger car. Reliability refers to how often the car in the shop. How often we need to perform preventative or corrective maintenance. How often it fails. [Read more…]
