Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When To Use Stainless And Alloy Steel In Place Of Plastic Or Carbon Steel. There are many times when it is false economy to use carbon steel and plastic items. It is often better to use stainless and alloy steels instead. They last longer and deliver a lower life cycle cost.
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Reliability engineers and quality engineers both work to ensure that products and systems are functioning effectively and efficiently. However, they have slightly different focus areas and goals.
The primary focus of reliability engineering is designing systems that are dependable and able to function consistently over time. This may involve identifying and addressing potential sources of failure, implementing preventive maintenance protocols, and conducting testing to ensure that the system is functioning as intended. The ultimate goal of reliability engineering is to minimize downtime and ensure that the system is available for use when needed.
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Recently, Erik, a reader of this blog directed me to a video his firm has created that explains the role of trees leading to the Buncefield explosion.
Remember the Buncefield incident occurred in oil storage and transport depot. Thus the fuel involved was liquid hydrocarbon. The most probable outcome of a liquid hydrocarbon release is a fire…so it is conceivable that other circumstances such as amount and duration of release and the semi-confinement provided by surroundings may have lead to flame acceleration and increased explosion overpressures.
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Uncertainty is all around us, never more so than today. Whether it concerns a global pandemic, the economy, or your finances, health, and relationships, much of what lies ahead in life remains uncertain.
Nonetheless, life continues. You still must earn a living, take care of the family, house, and car, and walk the dog. All under these new clouds of stress and uncertainty.
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Understanding and Using Human Factors for Human Error Prevention and Mistake Proofing Gets You a Great Safety Advantage
There are many businesses around, even national and international sized companies, who have done an OHS risk assessment for their operations and still have poor workplace safety performance and lousy safety statistics. Clearly they got something seriously wrong when they undertook their operational health and safety (OHS) risk assessment process.
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Imagine observing inputs and outputs of a self-service system, without individual service times. How would you estimate the distribution of service time without following individuals from input to output? The maximum likelihood estimator for an M/G/Infinity self-service-time distribution function from ships and returns counts works for nonstationary arrival process M(t)/G/Infinity self-service systems, under a condition. A constant or linearly increasing arrival (ships) rate satisfies the condition. If you identify outputs by failure mode then you could estimate reliability by failure mode or quantify reliability growth, without life data. [Read more…]
Let’s do a quick recap of where we’ve come from. First we had to figure out where you are on your journey to success, in a totally honest way, which we covered in the chapter of Self-Awareness.
Next we had learned how to hold ourselves accountable for what got us to where we are today. We discussed how to create a personal development plan to map out our different responsibilities in life, what those mean in specific, day-to-day terms, and how to monitor and measure our success on aiming for and achieving those goals.
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In December 2005, fire and explosion at Buncefield oil storage depot injured 40 people. Overfilling of a fuel storage tank (Tank 912) led to release of unleaded gasoline (petrol) which formed a cloud of flammable vapor that subsequently ignited.
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There was a lot to unpack from the 45-minute information session. After all, three different governmental units evaluated the issue for over three years. We had not had a debriefing on the issue in a year. And the issue was an emerging one, ripe with complexity and uncertainty. Effective communication can be difficult in these types of information sessions.
I am often asked about the application of detection in FMEAs. When and how to assess for the risk of detection can be confusing. Here are some pointers for when and how to use detection in an FMEA.
Andy Benoit once said, “Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
This statement is so true when corporate leaders and managers tend to over-complicate processes or over-engineer systems in organizations. Designing and implementing your organization’s enterprise-wide risk management system is no exception.
[Read more…]The Rate of Occurrence of Failure (ROCOF) curve is the sum of all the individual component failure curves across the service life of an asset. As shown below, it looks like a bathtub, giving it the nickname, a bathtub curve.
Equipment reliability is malleable by choice of policy and quality of practice.
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Another of the most commonly asked questions about quality engineering is “What is Six Sigma and how is it used in quality engineering?”
Six Sigma is a data-driven approach to continuous improvement that aims to reduce defects and variability in products, processes, and systems. It is based on the idea that by identifying and addressing the root causes of defects and variability, organizations can significantly improve the quality of their products and processes. Six Sigma is used to identify and eliminate defects and variability by collecting and analyzing data, identifying patterns and trends, and implementing process improvements.
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The U.S. Government has extended the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) to 2014. TRIA is intended to support insurance companies in case the claims from a terror incident go above a certain threshold.
What is interesting are the exclusions used by the government for this reinsurance.
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Despite their shared emphasis on maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) are not competing strategies.
Manufacturers can create a powerful synergy to leverage the strengths of each if they understand their respective strengths. Such a combination leads to exceptional reliability, cost-effective maintenance, and improved corporate culture – if implemented successfully. [Read more…]
