Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred respond to a question asked by one of our listeners … who is wondering about the number of ‘starts’ and ‘stops’ on electrical and mechanical systems when it comes to characterizing reliability.
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Chris and Fred discuss the long-term life of electric vehicles (EVs) and other rechargeable batteries, which tend to be longer than predicted. Why?
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Chris and Fred discuss how you analyze the failure data from a test … where failure is sometimes intermittent?
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Chris and Fred discuss the importance (or lack thereof) of having a PhD in reliability engineering. Is it worth it?
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Reliability engineers are often taught about ‘cut sets.’ But we rarely use them. Many reliability engineers don’t know what they are. But they are also in lots of textbooks as if they are really important. So what are they? The good news is that they are pretty simple to understand. The bad news is that they can be difficult to find. Mercifully, they are mainly used by computers who do the hard work of calculating system reliability for us. So knowing what ‘cut sets’ are can be really informative … even if you don’t use them every day.
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Chris and Fred discuss the importance of (trying to) set a reliability goal. Simple … right?
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We like to think that we make decisions based on the information we have available to us. We don’t. We instead make decisions based on emotions. And the most dominant emotion we rely upon when making a decision is confidence. You can have all the information in the world, but if you don’t understand it, don’t trust it, or otherwise don’t believe in it, then you won’t have the confidence to make the right decision. And we often try and generate ‘false’ confidence by having lots of clauses in contracts, schedule lots of tests, and demand people comply with standards. But the confidence these things create is a façade that quickly gets broken down when our products don’t meet our expectations. Want to understand the only way you should be generating confidence when it comes to reliability engineering? Join us for this webinar! [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the success or otherwise of the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) 2025 … with a focus on AI. What are your thoughts?
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Some of you might have heard of the ‘bell curve.’ Some of you might have heard that the ‘bell curve’ is sometimes called the ‘normal distribution.’ There is a reason it is called normal … but that is not always obvious. But then there is the ‘lognormal distribution.’ What is this? … and how does it relate back to the ‘bell curve?’ There is a really good reason for this link. And the good thing is that all you need is just a little bit of knowledge about how something breaks (and is repaired) to help use the lognormal distribution to help you make lots of important decisions … easily!
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Chris and Fred discuss how to deal with trying to find ‘reliability characteristics’ when you don’t have a lot of information. Sound familiar?
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Chris and Fred discuss how we do warranty analysis … which usually means trying to understand how many things fail during a warranty period (before you need to start paying for it …) Where do you start?
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Chris and Fred discuss how we get started with vibration testing. We are often told (or feel like) we need to conduct vibration testing on new products and components. But what does that mean? Where do we start?
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Chris and Fred discuss this thing called the MTBF … and how it (perhaps!) can be used in some reliability engineering applications … sometimes!
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Because the people that make them lie.
Not ‘obvious’ lying where lightbulb manufacturers calculate one reliability number and deliberately choose to put another number on their lightbulb packaging. But ‘insidious’ lying where they deliberately choose to measure the wrong thing to get a better number.
[Read more…]Chris and Fred discuss how reliability and quality is destroyed by organizations that like to have a ‘razor’ split between design and manufacturing teams. Why?
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