Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Because of their dependability and long effective lifespan, lithium ion rechargeable batteries are used in almost all modern electronic gadgets – cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, power tools, video games, PDA, household devices, e-bikes, security lighting, iPods, and automobiles. As the electronic market grows, it is evident that the lithium battery market will grow exponentially!
In rare cases, lithium batteries can catch fire – often in dramatic ways.
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In 1873, the superintendent of the Montreal Water Works signed out a manual for his organization:
“Rules and regulations for the employés [sic] in the department of the Montreal Water Works”
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An example of an automotive validation test reliability target is R97C50. In this case, the objective of the validation effort would be to demonstrate at one life on test, with 50% confidence, that the product has a reliability of 97% or better.
Does this mean that a field failure rate of 3% can be expected?
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A black swan event has a very low probability of happening but if it does the consequences are devastating. The black swan event for Texas was the weather and the consequence was catastrophic to their power grid. Prior to the February 2021 snowstorm with freezing temperatures, you must go back to December 1929 to find the last historical Texas snowstorm. The storm lasted for 24 hours dropping 12 inches of snow with freezing temperatures. But they did not have natural gas, windmills and solar panels to worry about like today.
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WHEN YOU BUILD AN ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR ISO 55001 CERTIFICATION THE ISO 55001 EAM SYSTEM MANUAL NEEDS TO COMPLY WITH THE ANNEX SL DOCUMENT STRUCTURE.
Here’s a practical way to create an ISO 55001 EAM system manual that covers all bases for both ISO 55001 certification and Annex SL requirements. Annex SL stipulates ten sections that every management system built to an ISO management system standard must contain. But matching legacy enterprise asset management 9EAM) system documents to Annex SL sections can be tricky.
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COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is easy to estimate: CFR=deaths/cases. Regression forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths are easy but complicated by variants and nonlinearity. Epidemiologists use SIR models (Susceptible, Infectious, and “Removed”) to estimate Ro. These are baseball statistics. Reliability people need age-specific reliability and failure-rate function estimates, by failure mode, to diagnose problems, recommend spares, plan maintenance, do risk analyses, etc. Markov models use actuarial transition rates.
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You must have comprehensive “historical data” in order to carry out Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) (misconception)
Historical data is important for a Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis. But the kind of data that is generally collected isn’t sufficient to answer all the questions in the RCM process – and thereby formulate specific solutions.
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Green is “In”.
Consumers, retail stores, and corporate policies are all going green.
But just because you have a green technology does not mean you have ZERO risks. Let me give you a couple of examples.
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“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are times when an FMEA facilitator has difficulty arriving at consensus with the FMEA team. This sometimes happens when there are two or more competing ideas or solutions and members of the team feel strongly about their personal idea or solution. One tool that can be used to solve this problem is called Pugh Analysis, a type of decision matrix.
Even as I write this article, jobs in industries ranging from entertainment and media to manufacturing and medicine are being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) and its many iterations. Many people don’t even know they are already in a competition with AI and that several facets of their job are already being accomplished by a digital application or intelligent machine. Workers will not be able to outpace these machines simply by working longer hours or moving faster on the assembly line.
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Any engineer with known expertise or responsibilities in the area of ‘vibration’ will be asked sooner or later to advise on a vibration isolation problem. While the principles of vibration isolation are relatively simple to understand the practical application requires some design skills and a good understanding of the vibration source or sources.
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A few weeks ago, I had written about a recent fire at the alkylation unit in Citgo’s Corpus refinery, and raised the question about HF usage. Today, I would like to further delve into the alternate technologies for alklyation and also take this opportunity to summarize feedback I have received from a few readers: Mike Bordeaux, Sujith Panikkar, Menno van der Hauw, and Fabienne Salimi.
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Any maintenance manager at a manufacturing plant or facility is likely aware of the problems caused by faulty equipment. Even if just one piece of equipment out of thousands breaks down, it could cause your entire operation to come to a halt. Preventive maintenance involves scheduling various maintenance activities to keep your equipment in peak condition and prevent breakdowns and failure. EAM/CMMS software is an essential tool for scheduling preventive maintenance and monitoring performance. The following are 5 tips to improve preventive maintenance with maintenance management software.
As you begin design validation (DV) and product validation (PV) testing you are entering the more formal phase of a test program. Usually, you are working to internal and/or customer test specs with timelines that are critical and little margin for error. If you’ve conducted adequate design verification testing and given your parts a chance to fail on test exposures that are similar to those your product will see in the field, you have reason to expect to be successful in validation [see previous article outlining accelerated test methods: Expect to Pass Validation].
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Becoming a risk manager can seem to be more art than science. There’s not a clear pathway from degree to junior risk manager to senior risk manager to CRO (Chief Risk Officer) in the same way that you can chart the progress from freshly minted CPA (Certified Public Accountant) to head of Ernst & Young. (Financial risk management is the exception here as there is usually a clear path there.)
So why is the risk manager career path fuzzy compared to other professions?
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