Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Did you know that early FMEA standards did not include recommendations to reduce risk? They limited the analysis to the technical risk, without making specific recommendations. The first time I am aware of that an FMEA standard added a column called “Recommended Actions” was in 1993. Thankfully, it is common practice today to include Recommended Actions in FMEAs.
But what makes for excellent Recommended Actions and what is their role in an FMEA? We’ll begin with the fundamentals.
Here’s a common situation that most of us have experienced in our careers or education:
You’re working on a project with a tight deadline, the task is do-able, but difficult. Everyone has their specific tasks assigned, and the whole team is working together on a final document to turn in. Your section is the financial analysis portion of the project.
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While evaluating impact of a toxic release, you may be interested in how the concentration of the toxicant increases in a room and its impact on indoor personnel. For example, if there is a H2S release in the plant and you want to estimate the increase in concentration in a nearby office building.
I want to share a simple model to estimate indoor concentrations following an outdoor toxic release. [Read more…]
Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. This article summarizes a review of ten risk matrices performed by facility owners or their consultants. [Read more…]
In this week’s edition, I introduce you to the concept of small multiples, and, more importantly, how to make them in R. This is one of those really low effort-super high return kind of features of R that can make you look like a rock star of data visualization. So, without further ado, let’s jump right into it!
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New superconducting magnet breaks magnetic field strength records, paving the way for practical, commercial, carbon-free power fusion energy. MIT and U.S. startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) led the project. This test paves the way for a demonstration device to show a plasma can be created and contained that generates more energy than it consumes. The demonstration device is expected to be completed in 2025. The hope is that in the future there will be thousands of fusion plants powering clean electric grids around the world helping to save the planet.
Abstract: Many companies struggle with constant plant and equipment problems despite doing the very best they know how to keep their plant and machinery reliable. Their real problem, which they cannot see for themselves, is that what is done in the company is completely wrong for creating highly reliable production equipment. If you cannot “see” how reliability is destroyed in your business, then you are doomed to suffer poor reliability and low uptime forevermore.
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In the early 1700’s, English mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes derived the eponymous mathematical theorem that allows us to calculate the probability of an event occurring based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event.
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Earlier I had written about the use of RFID for tracking hazardous substances. One of the readers, Sujith, wrote to me that RFID can be a ignition source and thus pose a potential for fire/explosion.
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In today’s competitive business environment, reliable equipment operation is crucial for uninterrupted operations and increased productivity. On the other hand, saving on maintenance costs can be a perilous path to tread.
Maintaining a balance between the two factors can have far-reaching effects, potentially even raising maintenance costs. The solution lies in optimizing equipment reliability, making it the bedrock of maintenance efforts.
It may be difficult to accelerate double-digit percentage cost reductions in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals and nuclear. Nonetheless, the primary focus should be on improving equipment reliability, which could lead to lower maintenance costs. [Read more…]
In this week’s edition, we dig into a scenario you’ve probably run across when working in Excel or other software, for example Minitab —at least I have, many times.
Say you have a complete dataset. The data has been collected, and you’re now getting ready to run plot it or run some sort of analysis on it. It should be plug and play, but it ends up not being the case as the data is not formatted in the right way, and you’re not able to run your analysis (it happens pretty frequently if you ask me).
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Here is a great example from an industrial operation of a maintenance procedure using an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise (ACE) 3T standard operating procedure (SOP) format. To make it better would need photos and/or videos included for critical tasks. 3T stands for Target-Tolerance-Test, which are the minimum criteria needed to specify maintenance task quality and prove compliance. The 3T’s are a simple maintenance work quality assurance technique we invented to maximise the chance of doing outstandingly high-quality maintenance work that brings you outstanding plant and equipment reliability.
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We have general risks and, quite often when risks manifest themselves the various militaries around the world are called in to deal with the issues, crises, disasters, and catastrophes that occur. The military do not enter these on their own volition nor are they of their own making but, in line with the principle that risk is best dealt with by the party most suited, the military are tasked by their lords and masters.
We’ve spoken enough about the psychology of self-discipline, let’s get into actionable steps, things that are easy to remember and implement on a day to day basis. If writing some of these down on a post-it note help remind you, do it.
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William Sutherland was a ship’s master carpenter in the late 1600s. Returning to shore, he became a foreman in the Portsmouth dockyard, then was promoted to be a senior manager at the Deptford yard. Sutherland wrote two books about naval architecture and ship construction. His 1717 book Britain’s Glory: or Ship-Building Unvail’d documented lifecycle maintenance in the Royal Navy.
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