Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Let's have in depth discussion during the live monthly webinar series. Reliability Engineering Basics, Statistics, Accelerated Testing, Program Assessment and Improvement. Catch up or review past events below.
To attend an upcoming live event visit the Live Events section of the site which lists the available upcoming webinars.
Find one that looks interesting and register for the event. You will receive login directions and reminders prior to the event. Plus you will be able to join the discussion during the event.
The more you understand the failure mechanisms the easier it is to design an accelerated life test, (ALT). Yet, we often do not have all the information we would like to draft an ALT. So, what do we do then?
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There are so many books on leadership, management, more leadership, reliability, quality, customer first, even more leadership, et cetera. But there remains a common refrain I hear repeatedly from reliability engineers struggling to make a difference: ‘reliability is just not relevant to my organization.’ There is a common thread to this common refrain – we only hear it from people who work in organizations that don’t have a clear understanding of ‘why’ they are doing what they do.
Reliability engineers LOVE Weibull plots. They often make sense out of a bunch of seemingly random points. Or at least we feel like they make sense. Anything that turns a bunch of random points into a straight line is automatically making sense … right? Wrong. It is up to us as reliability engineers to look at Weibull plots and work out what is going on. [Read more…]
When conducting an accelerated life test it is essential to carefully consider the acceleration factor (AF). Like warp drives shortening distance, accelerated life tests (ALT) attempt to shorten time. Think warp factor and acceleration factor as being similar, well sort of. [Read more…]
We all know that all you need to work out how many spare parts you need is to put some numbers into a computer, perhaps throw in a ‘confidence’ level as well, and use the number that computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]
We can make a guess, some assumptions, or conduct an experiment. In fact, we use engineering judgment, prudent assumptions to create our experiments that lead to understanding time to failure information. Accelerated life testing, ALT, is one of the most complex and important types of experiments we conduct. It involves samples, failure mechanisms, stress, measurements, and statistics. [Read more…]
One of the things I like about reliability engineering is the field has a stable set of tools and approaches, with an ever-changing set of challenges. The process to conduct an FMEA or Root Cause Analysis hasn’t changed much over time. Meanwhile the advent of new designs, new materials, new assembly techniques, along with higher customer expectations, we continue to face interesting problems. [Read more…]
This is the fourth in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ We have examined how to turn a bunch of data points (like the different failure points of devices under test) into something simple, useful, and sometimes beautiful! This is something that commercial software can’t do. [Read more…]
Risk is uncertainty. Will this work? How will this item fail? Is it safe? Risk is not limited to product failure as it includes brand topics such as market acceptance, regulatory approval, supply chain stability, international conflicts, and more. Reliability engineering tends to focus on product failure to perform as expected and we have to fit into the large context of risks facing any product or system. [Read more…]
This is the third in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ The first webinar showed what it actually means to turn reliability data into something that a decision maker can use. Not a chart. Not a graph. Not a ‘p’ value. Not anything else that you find in a textbook but isn’t useful. Last month’s webinar talked about how the best way to do this is to use computers … but in an easy way! And we talked about how we create a ‘posse’ of possible ‘ways’ we can explain the data we see. And this webinar is about how we use this thing called Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC) to create this ‘posse.’ And the ‘posse’ isn’t random … it is based on the ‘likelihood’ of each on being the correct one. Which is how MCMC works. [Read more…]
The goal of this presentation is to educate the audience of options to prevent electronic equipment failure used in enclosed spaces from corrosion through preventative maintenance practices. As most know, the metals used in today’s electronics are processed but want to turn back to its original state as the iron components will oxidize, and the corrosion process begins. The addition of humidity, vibration, temperature swings, and acid environments (such as being in a tire plant or downwind from a refinery) will accelerate the process. It is this corrosion and subsequent weakening or disfiguring of the metal that causes malfunctions and failures [Read more…]
Dick Moss, retired HP Corporate Quality and Reliability Manager, once mentioned there are really only five equations necessary to be a good reliability engineer. He quickly listed four equations and with a smile said the fifth one is the one you need to solve the current problem. [Read more…]
Last month’s webinar was ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ And we showed how to slightly ‘tweak’ all those textbook reliability analyses into USEFUL ACTIVITIES. What good is a 90 % confidence bound on reliability? What does this mean for profit? Or fleet size? Or mission success? We solved this problem using a technique based on identifying the ‘likely’ ways we can explain our data. In fact – there is a whole bunch of statistics on creating the ‘likelihood’ on an explanation of what we see. And we use this ‘likelihood’ in most statistical applications – including those USEFUL ACTIVITIES we talked about above. [Read more…]
The difficult part of creating this list of essential techniques is to avoid selecting just the most common. There is an overlap between essential and those commonly used, yet essential implies a technique is crucial. Crucial on rare yet very important situations. The idea for today’s discussion is to focus on those vital few techniques that I believe every reliability engineer must master. [Read more…]
Let’s say that you have some ‘reliability guys’ do some reliability analysis on reliability data … and they give you some numbers. Or a plot. Or a curve. Perhaps you are the reliability guy … and you do the analysis – and then what? [Read more…]