Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
If a manufacturing plant was a human brain: Maintenance would be the repairing blood flow, Operations would be the electricity sparking between synapses, and Reliability would be the conscience. [Read more…]
Knowing How Equipment Fails Allows Effective Plans to Be Put In Place and Improve Equipment Reliability
In the 1960s the failure rate of jet aircraft was high even with the extensive maintenance programs that were put in place to prevent the failures. The programs required overhauls, rebuilds and detailed inspections which required the various components to be disassembled. All of these activities were based on an estimated save life of the equipment. [Read more…]
How to Properly Calculate System AvailabilityRecently received a request for my opinion concerning the calculation of system availability using the classic formula
$latex \displaystyle&s=4 A=\frac{MTBF}{MTBF+MTTR}$
The work is to create a set of goals for various suppliers and contractors to achieve. The calculation values derive from vendor data sheets and available information concerning MTBF and MTTR. The project is in the design phase thus they do not have working system’s available to measure actual availability.
How would you go about improving on this approach? [Read more…]
Giving a presentation last week and asked if anyone uses an 85/85 type test, and a couple indicated they did. I then asked why?
The response was – just because. We have always done it, or it’s a standard, or customers expected it. The most honest response was ‘I don’t know’.
They why is the test being done? Who is using the information for a decision? What is the [Read more…]
The classic formula for availability is MTBF divided by MTBF plus MTTF. Standard. And pretty much wrong most of the time.
Recently working for a bottling plant design team we pursued the design options to improve availability and throughput of the new line. The equipment would remain basically the same, filler, capper, labeler, etc. So we decided to gather the last 6 months or so of operating data which included up and down time. Furthermore the data included time to failure and time to repair information. [Read more…]