Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
During product development, we’re consistently looking for ways to learn more about the product in order to make design decisions. Some of that comes from test.
What do we do when our test results are…surprising?
We talk about some next steps I typically take when tasked with surprises.
Kirk and Fred discussing the paths they took in Reliability Engineering, how our past experience shaped our view of the best methods for improving the reliability of systems, and how we learn new information on reliability issues.
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Greg and Fred discussing why people have a hard time adjusting and pivoting in times of uncertainty, much like what we all experience today.
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This episode is an introduction to the Metal Conversations podcast. Michael Pfeifer from Industrial Metallurgists, LLC introduces himself and gives a brief description of what the podcast series will be about.
Michael Pfeifer is a metallurgist and metals engineer. He works with design and manufacturing clients to help with component materials selection, manufacturing process development, supplier evaluation, failure analysis and root cause analysis.
He received a B.S. and M.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University. He is a Professional Engineer, licensed in Illinois.
He’s wrote a book – Materials Enabled Designs. It teaches how to select materials that optimize product performance, reliability, and cost.
For more information about Michael go to https://www.imetllc.com/about/
Industrial Metallurgists offer metallurgy and metals engineering consulting and training. The training is geared to design, manufacturing, and quality engineers. More information about Industrial Metallurgists’ services and training is at https://www.imetllc.com/
We have a reliability target for our system. But we’re not meeting it.
To avoid this scenario, what is something we can do in early development?
When we’re figuring out our concept, we can better learn about our options. We can work with Reliability Engineers to understand what we know, the risk in what we don’t know, and to prioritize reliability of the modules to be able to meet the reliability of our whole system.
We talk about using reliability allocation to help us choose reliability goals for modules of our product design. And we talk about its limitations.
On this episode, there are no guests, and no specific topics. I would like to use this opportunity to thank my guests, our syndication partners, and, of course, my audience we’re making this podcast so successful. We have a full season ahead in 2023 and I’m excited to share those episodes with you. Please keep your questions and topics suggestions coming. Send them to. mike@mikekonrad.com.
A huge shout-out to my 2022 guests:
Joel Scutchfield
Brian O’Leary
Tony Lentz
Mike Adamson
Greg Papandrew
Kevin Huo
Michelle Ogihara
Marco Sanchez
Colin Harper
Dr. Kunal Shah
Dr. Ron Laskey
Jim Hall
Claire Hotvedt
Tom Watson
Phil Zarrow
Keith Bryant
Dr. David Bernard
David Kruidhof
Robert Boguski
Jen Fijalkowski
Graham Naisbitt
Matt Kelly
David Raby
Ed Stone
Thomas Ricciardelli
Dr. Martin Anselm
Julie Silk
Raiyo Aspandiar.
David Greenman
Michael Mchale
Randy Cherry
Dr. Chuck Bauer
David Graham
Greg and Fred discussing the tradeoffs in reshoring. Many companies are considering bringing design and manufacturing back to the US or host country.
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Chris and Fred discuss whether you want to lay blame (i.e. sue) or improve reliability? Don’t be confused … accountability is important. But that doesn’t replace everyone ‘owning’ the end result.
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New product development projects are really exciting at the start.
Even though we know very little about what the final product is going to look like, we can still use a quick graphical tool to help us direct our engineering attention.
We talk about ways to use a very simple System Architecture Diagram to help us get started and ways we can continue to iterate on it throughout development to help us communicate and make decisions.
Any product is a collection of materials that have been engineered, shaped, and modified to become components and joints (e.g., weld and braze joints). The materials can degrade due to exposure to use conditions – steel screws corrode when exposed to water, some plastics become brittle when exposed to sunlight, and coatings on surfaces can wear away.
Components and joints will stop functioning as required if their materials degrade too much. This is a problem if it reduces or loses product performance before the end of a product’s expected life.
Identifying the conditions to which materials are exposed and selecting materials that can withstand the exposure are critical parts of designing products that have good reliability.
During this event, I will discuss identifying the conditions that can cause materials to degrade. [Read more…]
Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution. Beyond the buzzwords, what does this mean? My guest today is David Graham, Chief Technology Officer of 4IR.UK, a wholly owned subsidiary of Internet of Things focused, British Systems.
4IR.UK specializes in creating Monitoring, Control and Automation solutions, often based on the MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform, for manufacturing environments. They also provide consultancy and development for other Industry 4.0 platforms.
I was intrigued by a webinar presented by David entitled “A Decade of Industry 4.0 – What it wasn’t, what it was, and today, I’ll speak with David about his thoughts, experiences, and opinions of Industry 4.0.
David’s Contact Info:
David Graham
david.graham@4ir.uk
www.4ir.uk
Chris and Fred discuss what (if anything) we can learn from advertised warranty or reliability specifications from vendors.
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Philip and Fred discussing a handful of traits that may be unique to reliability engineers.
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Over the past couple of years, COVID has been a big catalyst for supply chain issues—product shortages, working remotely, all the COVID shutdowns. How has the shop floor changed over the last three years amidst all of this unprecedented change? In this week’s episode, we have Joey Cantrell, General Manager of Operations at Constellium, on the show to share his insights on this topic. Listen now!
During the product development process, are there so many design prototypes but the team’s still not getting buy-in?
Are design concepts changing mid-development after it’s “too late” to change the design?
Are designs picked-apart only after they’re nearly done?
Late in development, are there many fires to fight with too many surprises at test?
Quality during Design is not about compliance activities. It’s about being proactive with our team in early development. And knowing how to have conversations that gets us what we need so we can engineer designs.
We explore why Quality can help us PRUNE the development process just by the nature of how it’s used.
And we highlight the 3 areas that we focus on in Quality during Design: risk-based decisions, quality and reliability engineering partnership, and the user’s process.
