Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The Apex Ridge article series covers a diverse set of topics that relate to many of our reader’s work, interests, and experiences. The articles are inspired by industry experiences with the intent of sharing, educating and assisting you with your career challenges and growth. The content is targeted for a diverse audience with backgrounds even extending beyond engineering (Hmm talking to you project and business managers). My hope is that these topics inspire you to have discussions with your colleagues or right in the comments of the series. I look forward to seeing you on-line soon.
I have a customer that has developed an impressive wrist worn biometric sensor for athletes. The system is worn on the athletes wrist, like many other personal devices. But this product is for serious athletes that aren’t just looking for non-descript data like step count and heart rate. What are you even supposed to do with that information?
“What’s the MTBF of a Human?” That’s a bit of a strange question?
I ask this question in my Reliability 101 course. Why ask such a weird question? I’ll tell you why. Because MTBF is the worst, most confusing, crappy metric used in the reliability discipline. Ok maybe that is a smidge harsh, it does have good intentions. But the amount of damage that has been done by the misunderstanding it has caused is horrendous.
MTBF stands for “Mean Time Between Failure.” It is the inverse of failure rate. An MTBF of 100,000 hrs/failure is a failure rate of 1/100,000 fails/hr = .00001 fails/hr. Those are numbers, what does that look like in operation? [Read more…]
I’m just back from a week long trip to Switzerland. I was there developing a new Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) course for the “R is 4 Reliability” education series. If you have ever been to Switzerland you found that there are several things that are striking about this place. The natural beauty is unparalleled. Just about every view from every angle is of a beautiful snow capped mountain that has a lake or stream connected at its base. It’s never got old to look up and be viewing a real life postcard.
“The Perfect Reliability Program Plan”
We held the New England HALT Seminar this past week. It’s a little fun thing we like to put on every so often here in Boston. We do a few sessions where we talk about Reliability topics, we then play around with the HALT chambers and break a few things. It was great having sponsorship from Espec/Qualmark, and Air Liquide this year. In past years it has just been me doing a few 30 minute sessions (one man show). But this year we had four speakers and a diverse set of topics. Definitely our best one yet. This may grow to where we can’t do it at the lab any longer. Hopefully not, I don’t want to try and bring a HALT chamber to a conference center.
We held the New England HALT Seminar this past week. It’s a little fun thing we like to put on every so often here in Boston. We do a few sessions where we talk about Reliability topics, we then play around with the HALT chambers and break a few things. It was great having sponsorship from Espec/Qualmark, and Air Liquide this year. In past years it has just been me doing a few 30 minute sessions (one man show). But this year we had four speakers and a diverse set of topics. Definitely our best one yet. This may grow to where we can’t do it at the lab any longer. Hopefully not, I don’t want to try and bring a HALT chamber to a conference center.
My wife (Beth) and I both train and compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It’s a grappling sport like wrestling. In Jiu Jitsu your Gi (the karate looking uniform) is a big part of the sport. It’s a very heavy fabric with very specific features that are inspected before each match. Many moves involve the GI, especially the jacket. I have wrapped my sleeve around someones neck for a choke, You can grab the end of both of the opponents sleeves and dig your feed into their elbows to lock up their arms and throw them, you can use an opponent’s own lapel and wrap it around their neck for a submission or simply to roll them any way you wish.
It’s been a few years since I have had a Porsche 911 in the stable. It seemed like the right time since were down to only two 
sports cars in addition to the daily drivers. I think five cars is the bare minimum these days. “It’s only a problem if you want to stop but can’t.” I don’t want to. There are some less free spirited individuals in the house who have expressed differing opinions.
I was recently in New York City for work. I stopped by to see a friend in the area. He said “I have something interesting to show you.” I was pretty excited because when Mark says “I have something interesting to show you.” you know it is going to be good. He’s a writer and his passion is finding strange and interesting things. My personal Indiana Jones. Many days he wakes up and just gives himself some adventure assignment and the goes searching for it.
If you recall I went on a slightly crazy adventure up to the edge of the article circle with my adventure buddy, my daughter Natalie, 11. We almost froze to death on a mountain just to see the Northern Lights (story here). But we also did something we both have always wanted to do and knew would be epic, a dog sled ride. The first thing I have to say about it is holy crap those dogs are fast. It felt like you could blow the doors off a snowmobile if you came across one.
I was recently giving a presentation for IEEE at MIT Lincoln Labs here in the Boston area. The topic was one of my favorites, my new playground, Use Case 7 ! The crowd loved the idea of expanding how we access use cases and came up with great examples. and experiences, of their own. They found many areas in their work where the Use Case 7 exercise may yield some interesting insight.
In February I did a hit and run trip to Fairbanks Alaska with my daughter, age 11, to try and see the Northern Lights. It was a long shot but I’ve done nuttier expeditions and she was game. It was actually her idea, and she knew who the right person was to ask for such a trip. She turned 11 in January. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. I was ready for the “this or that electronic” request. Instead she said “I want to see the Northern Lights.” First thought was “Geez that’s a bit extravagant” but
then my second thought was she’s 11 and this could have a great impact on her and what an interesting/cool thing to ask for. It might energize an interest in physics or natural photography, or cold weather clothing design. I also thought about how in a few years she may not want to do anything with me because I’ll be an “idiot who doesn’t get it.”
In the past five weeks I have been to Miami, Orlando, Cleveland, Chicago, Fairbanks Alaska, Fortuna Costa Rica. For one stint of that I went Fairbanks to Boston to Costa Rica in a 24 hr period. I walked into my home dropped the Alaska suitcase, grabbed the prepacked Cost Rica suitcase, slept for 6 hours ,and was back on a plane 13 hrs later. I think that qualifies as a HALT test considering the lowest temperature I experienced in Fairbanks (Arctic circle edge) was -30F on top of a mountain and then 85F in Costa Rica in the Rainforest.
So why did I do all of this? Because it’s me and it seemed fun.
Anyone who knows me knows I love modifying things. I always feel there is a better design. This is the goal of a reliability engineer at heart. I enjoy sports and I enjoy running. I do believe that we were born to run. If you look at the human body that is clearly what it was built for. Our big toe faces forward, which makes them no longer good for gripping things like branches. But it does make them great for landing a foot in forward motion. We have extremely long legs in proportion to our bodies compared to all other primates. We are slender which provide a great ratio of surface area to mass for cooling. The ability to sweat without hair is a great temperature control method as well. We are also the only mammal that can uncouple our breathing to our running pace because we are bipeds. This let’s us optimize our breathing for long distance.
The Mars Rover is an incredible reliability story. And as you may know they have decided to permanently shut it off. A friend recently sent me this email when he saw an article on it.
Hey Adam,
The Opportunity rover was supposed to last 90 days, and instead lasted 15 years.
Is that due to remarkable engineering, or was the machine really supposed to last that long and the scientists blew their calculations as to its “lifespan”?
Mark,
My response:
I introduced my new program tool “Program Risk Effects Analysis” (PREA) at the RAMS Conference in Orlando this week. It’s a great tool to assist in accessing if program schedule or resource should accommodate found design risk from testing or analysis.
-Adam
