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You are here: Home / Archives for Articles / CRE Preparation Notes

CRE Preparation Notes

Prep notes for ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer exam ISSN 2165-8633

The CRE Preparation Notes series provides you with short practical tutorials on all the elements that make up the ASQ CRE body of knowledge. The articles provide introductory material, basics, how-tos, examples, and practical use guidance for the full range of reliability engineering concepts, terms, tools, and practices.

Keep your knowledge fresh by regularly reviewing topics and tools that make up reliability engineering.

Sign up for the CRE Preparation Notes email list for the new reliability engineering short tutorials.

- Improve your reliability engineering skills

- Learn about the wide range of tools available

- Enhance your resume with the ASQ CRE

You will find the most recent tutorials in reverse chronological order below.

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Types of Risk

Types of Risk

Creating a product or maintaining equipment is actually about our ability to manage risk. The various risks are outlined below, and there are more to consider. This summary covers the basics related to reliability. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Management Tagged With: Product development

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Program Elements Part 2

Program Elements Part 2

This is a two part series where I outline the basic elements of creating and supporting a reliability program. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Management Tagged With: Reliability program

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Program Elements Part 1

Program Elements Part 1

This is a two part series where I outline the basic elements of creating and supporting a reliability program.

Gather Requirements and Set Reliability Goals

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Management Tagged With: Reliability program

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Reliability Management Terminology

Reliability Management Terminology

For Reliability Engineers to converse with one another and with non-technical people in an organization, it is necessary for the language of reliability to be widely understood. These terms form the backbone of a working vocabulary and should be well understood by Certified Reliability Engineers.

Availability: Fraction of time that a system is usable. Steady state Availability = MTBF/(MTBF+MTTR) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Management Tagged With: Technical writing

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Weibull Distribution

Weibull Distribution

A continuous distribution is useful for modeling time to failure data. For reliability practitioners, the Weibull distribution is a versatile and powerful tool. I often fit a Weibull when first confronted with a life dataset, as it provides a reasonable fit given the flexibility provided by the distributions parameters. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Statistics distributions and functions, Weibull distribution

by Fred Schenkelberg 3 Comments

Good Mind

Good Mind

It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well. — Descartes

Learning and Value

Over the past week, I’ve received a couple of questions about the pursuit of a graduate degree in reliability engineering and about preparing for the CRE. One question was particularly interesting – how will a reliability engineering graduate degree or CRE help my career? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Prep, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Management Tagged With: Benefits of reliability engineering, Value

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Variance

Variance

In another post, I started the discussion about variability and interquartile range. This is part 2 of that discussion and will focus on variance.

With rare exception, most distributions or groups of data require more than one parameter (or statistic) to fully describe both the location and spread (scale and shape) of the group of data. Is the data clumped tightly about some value, or spread out over a wide range. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Statistics concepts

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Degradation Hypothesis

Degradation Hypothesis

This week I received a question from the ASQ Librarian concerning a person’s question about one of the CRE Question bank questions. It was a nice two-part question concerning a hypothesis test of a sample means value and degradation.

Here’s the question as sent over for consideration. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Hypothesis testing

by Fred Schenkelberg 11 Comments

Binomial Cumulative Density Function

Binomial Cumulative Density Function

Last week I posted about the Binomial probability density function, and it is useful when calculating the probability of exactly x successes out of n trials given p probability of success for each trial.

Well, what happens if you want to know the probability of 2 or more successes for example? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Binomial distribution, Statistics distributions and functions

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Binomial Probability Density Function

Binomial Probability Density Function

There are many cases where the results of an experiment (or trial) are either it works or it doesn’t, pass/fail, success/failure. Only two possible outcomes one of which we define as success the other outcome as failure. The binomial distribution is suitable if the random variable (the set of experimental or trial outcomes) when

  • the number of trials is fixed, and
  • the probability of success is equal for all trials.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Statistics distributions and functions

by Fred Schenkelberg 6 Comments

Common Formulas

Common Formulas

Running through a couple of practice CRE exams recently (yeah, I know I should get out more…) found a few formulas kept coming up in the questions. While it is not a complete list of equation you’ll need for the exam, the following five will help in many of the questions. They seem popular maybe because the relate to key concepts in the body of knowledge, or they are easy to use in question creation. I do not know why. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Prep, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Exponential distribution, Failure Rate, Statistics distributions and functions

by Fred Schenkelberg 4 Comments

Reliability from Hazard Step Function

Reliability from Hazard Step Function

Received a sample problem from someone preparing for the CRE exam saying it was a tricky one. 

The hazard rate function for a device is given by

0.001 if t ≤ 10 hours  and 0.01 if t > 10 hours

What is the reliability of this device at 12 hours?

I first draw the hazard function [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability Tagged With: Statistics distributions and functions

by Fred Schenkelberg 12 Comments

Exponential Reliability

Exponential Reliability

Down to the last week of preparation for the exam on March 2nd. Good luck to all those signed up for that exam date. Time to focus on preparing your notes, organizing your references and doing a final run through of practice exams. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Probability and Statistics for Reliability, Reliability Modeling and Predictions Tagged With: Exponential distribution, Failure Rate, Reliability Block Diagram (RBD), Statistics distributions and functions

by Fred Schenkelberg 40 Comments

Reliability with Confidence

Reliability with Confidence

There are rare situations when we would like to estimate the reliability at the lower confidence level after estimating the mean from a sample (often a test result). And, to make even more rare of a situation, we know the population standard deviation. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Modeling and Predictions Tagged With: Life estimation

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

OC Curve with Hypergeometric Method

OC Curve with Hypergeometric Method

The operating characteristic curve is used to understand lot sampling plan. It graphically provides a relationship between the unknown lot’s defect rate (or total) and the probability of the specific sampling plan to accept the lot. Very good plans discriminate between good and bad lots. Poor plans may accept bad lots or reject good lots to easily. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Testing Tagged With: Acceptance sampling, Hypergeometric distribution

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CRE Preparation Notes

Articles by Fred Schenkelberg And Guest Authors

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