Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
There are many opinions about the use of the breakdown flag in SAP-PM. I would like to offer my opinion on this debate. First, I do not like the term “breakdown”. With a name like breakdown, nobody will want to check the box! No one likes to admit that a something has failed or is broken. I wish the field were named “reliability event” to take away this negative connotation. I will discuss this in more detail later.
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Using Reliability Principles for a Cheap Way To High Pumping Circuit Availability. High plant availability is achieved by having redundant equipment that can be brought on-line as soon as the operating unit has failed. Redundancy is expensive as there are two items to buy, two to install and two to maintain at full operating capacity. There is an alternate option for maintaining high pumping circuit availability by designing quick methods to bring mobile equipment into the circuit when pumps are down. This article explains how to set-up piping for a mobile pump to maintain operation when the normal duty pump is out of use.
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Email is 50 this year…its Golden Anniversary! It ‘happened’ in 1971 when Ray Tomlinson, the late computer engineer and first user, sent a transmission to himself utilising two independent computers…a revolutionary innovation at the time. The content of that primordial message is long forgotten and the same may also be the fate of many of the ~300 billion emails that are sent almost every day by the estimated 4 billion users around the world. Communication is said to bring us together or set us apart and email is no different.
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Abraham Lincoln taught the value of adequate preparation when he said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” By training, quality professionals are often focused on verifying the correctness of a product. A traditional inspector at the Lincoln Timber Company might have dutifully marked in her audit log the date and time, the type and size of tree, followed by the comment, “Cut down.”
But Honest Abe would have advised her to take a closer look at the tools and process used to complete the job.
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Years after 9/11 threat of terrorism continues to persist. Organizations buying insurance to provide protection from terror attacks is on the rise.
Prior to 9/11, there was terrorism insurance was not a major concern. However, after 9/11 insurance and reinsurance companies found themselves with significant amount of exposure. Immediately following 9/11, insurance companies were refusing to provide terrorism insurance or providing it at a very high premium to high risk facilities.
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The Arrhenius Equation is widely used and accepted by reliability and validation engineers from many industries to develop accelerated life tests (ALT) for thermal aging environments.
The general form of the equation describes the reaction rate of a process as a function of temperature (K), the Boltzmann constant (8.617E-5 eV/K) and two empirical factors. It can be written as:
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The Ever Given grounding in the Suez Canal is one of those events that will be labeled a “Black Swan” for sure. A rouge wind hits the ship turning the stern and wedging the vessel, bow and stern grounded straddling the canal and stranding ships entering from either end. The date Tuesday 23 March 2021. At around 7.40 a.m. local time the Ever Given ran aground. At nearly 200 feet wide and 1,300 feet long, it easily took up the width of the channel.
These are the slides from Mike’s conference presentation at the SIRFRt CM & Lube Forum 2008 Conference.
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Maintenance, failures, design for reliability, use of RCM and predictive technologies explained in infographic. Leave some feedback so we can make it better.
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Shotgun repair is trying to fix a system problem by replacing parts until the problem goes away. It is often done without regard to parts’ age-specific reliability information. Should you test before replacement? Which test(s) should you do? In which order? How long? Which part should you replace next if the test gave no indication of what’s wrong? What if test indication is imperfect or the fault is intermittent? What if there are more than one part failure?
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How I applied all seven steps of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) on my drive home from the Reliable Plant Conference
I just can’t seem to get away from Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).
(And that’s okay with me. After all, my (technical) heart and soul belong to RCM!)
I was driving home from Indianapolis, Indiana after speaking at the Reliable PlantConference ~ 399 miles.
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“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
Martin Luther King
One of the challenges for any team leader is bringing the team together and agreeing on decisions and actions going forward.
Consensus building is the best practice for all of the FMEA team decisions. This means the FMEA team takes the time to understand all sides of an issue and finds a solution or determines a course of action that is supported by all team members. Facilitating is a consensual activity.
It has been awhile since Ike…so I figured this would be an appropriate time to post on hurricane risks.
During a hurricane plant equipment can be damaged both by high winds and flooding. For example, the majority of plant equipment damage caused by Hurricane Rita (2005) was wind related, whereas more flood-related damage was reported during Hurricane Ike (2008).
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Stainless steel is known for its corrosion resistance in many environments, with different alloys having different levels of corrosion resistance. Also, stainless steels are available with a wide range of strengths. Understanding the reasons for the corrosion resistance is helpful for selecting alloys based on the required strength and environment to which the steel will be exposed.
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As we all have learned, eliminating defects is the key to a safe and profitable plant. But how do we know where our ‘bugs” are hiding? There are certainly many ways to uncover where the bugs are, but one place in particular is your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management system (EAM), as it is commonly referred.
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