Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

The Galvanic Corrosion Piping Trap!

The wrong combination of metals in electrical contact create a Galvanic Corrosion Trap that will cause many failures and costs in the future

Abstract:

The Galvanic Corrosion Trap. The wrong combination of metals can produce a corrosion cell of unequal voltage where one metal gives up its electrons and corrodes away. If the corrosion is not detected it will result in eventual failure of the equipment. Galvanic corrosion prevention is a design selection issue that one must always be aware of, as it can arise with the simplest of decisions. This article highlights a galvanic corrosion problem often seen in industry and sometimes missed by the person selecting equipment.

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by Bryan Christiansen Leave a Comment

Building A Strong Reliability Culture For Your Maintenance Department

A reliability culture is a set of values, attitudes, and behaviors that promote the consistent delivery of high-quality products and services. It is a collective effort involving every team member, not just the team of reliability engineers. Proactive organizations prioritize identifying and eliminating reliability issues early in the production process. In contrast, reactive organizations only take action after failures occur, which can result in costly consequences, such as product recalls. [Read more…]

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Where Did All These Reliability Life Models Come From?

Among students beginning their examination of reliability engineering, one question pops up repeatedly: Where did all these reliability life models come from? On one hand, reliability engineering is deeply entrenched in statistical models … Weibull, exponential, etc. But these models alone, do not fully explain the product life models. There is still a missing piece: the Physics of Failure (PoF).

PoF and reliability models are closely connected concepts, as they both relate to the ability of products, processes, and systems to perform their intended function consistently over time. [Read more…]

by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

Exploding Concrete

I recently came across a very interesting incident involving foam concrete.

Foam concrete is produced by mechanical mixing of foam prepared in advance with concrete mixture, and not with the help of chemical reactions. At the incident site, two workers were removing steelwork using angle grinders while the foam concrete was settling. There was an explosion injuring the two workers.

Foam concrete produces hydrogen which is highly flammable.

To know more about foam concrete hazards, click on the link below.

Health and Safety Alert on Foam Concrete Fire Hazards

by Karl Burnett Leave a Comment

1710 – Fincham’s 1851 history recorded 18th century prevention

John Fincham was master shipwright at Chatham and Portsmouth, and the superintendent of the school of naval architecture. He wrote several books about shipbuilding and construction of masts. In 1851, he wrote a history of naval architecture. His history recorded some design changes that the Royal Navy made in the 1700s to improve the reliability of its ships. These changes were important and permanent enough for Fincharm to discuss them 100 years later.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Benchmarking Operating CAPEX vs. Replacement Asset Value (RAV)

Is there a percent of replacement asset value benchmark for run and maintain capital expenditure?

Replacement asset value (RAV) is a performance indicator of expenditure related to the operation and care of the plant or equipment vs. CAPEX expenditure needed to replace the plant or equipment. Many people ask if there is a replacement asset value benchmark for the operating cost.

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Improve COVID Risk Communications and Decision Making

Guest Post by Annette Davison and Ian Wright Ph.D. (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Risk is the impact of uncertainty on achieving your objectives – the impact can be either positive or negative outcomes (ISO 31000). Governments have multiple objectives they have to meet – health and wellbeing, economic, environmental, ethical and so on. Each of these objectives essentially becomes a risk endpoint. The fundamental tenets of risk assessment are understanding the system (the context), understanding and assessing the risk (against your identified objectives), managing the risk and then monitoring whether the risk is actually controlled, and whether a further risk treatment needs to be applied.[1]

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by George Williams Leave a Comment

Self-Leadership Part 3

We now know how to audit our time, to assess our self-leadership, but we can help even further explain how to become more effective and efficient leaders of ourselves.

The first thing we need to do is be empowered to make our own strategy. This comes with a few requirements.

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by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

Biodiesel Incidents Trend

Based on incident data in biodiesel facilities, I had written that the biodiesel industry in the US is experiencing an incidentevery two-and-a-half months, i.e. approx. 10 weeks.

Here are incidents following my May 2009 blog post on biodiesel incident frequency.

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by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

FINESSE Facilitation: Why Qualitative Assessment Design Is Important

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.

The article provides tips for improving qualitative assessment design. Facilitators develop and use qualitative assessments in the execution of their work. Facilitators should be aware of qualitative assessment design as they seek to bring a group of participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all. [Read more…]

by Carl S. Carlson Leave a Comment

FMEA Occurrence Risk- Insights and Advices

One of the more challenging aspects of FMEA is the subject of Occurrence. Part of every FMEA standard or procedure is the assessment of Occurrence based on an agreed-upon scale. Here are some pointers for when and how to use occurrence in an FMEA.

We’ll start with a definition. The Oxford English dictionary defines “occurrence” as “the fact or frequency of something happening.”

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by Larry George 1 Comment

Variance of the Kaplan-Meier Estimator?

The well-known variance of the Kaplan-Meier reliability function estimator [Greenwoood, Wikipedia] can drastically under-or over-estimate variance. The covariances of the Kaplan-Meier reliability pairs at different ages are ignored or neglected. Variance errors and covariance neglect bias the variance of actuarial demand forecasts. Imagine what errors and neglect do to confidence bands on reliability functions.

Improving Fatigue Resistance

Fatigue involves localized, permanent damage to metals exposed to cyclic stress. In a previous article I discussed the fatigue mechanism. This article covers factors that can be addressed to improve high-cycle fatigue life

Factors that influence fatigue life

Several design, material, and fabrication factors influence component and joint fatigue life, including the following: [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

A Model for Deciding under Risk and Uncertainty

Guest Post by Patrick Ow (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

In Part 1, we looked at the two relevant dimensions for decision-making under certainty, risk, and uncertainty that form the certainty-uncertainty spectrum are:

Degree of certainty – It ranges from close to certainty to far from certainty.
Level of predictability and control – It moves from close to predictability and control to far from predictability and control.

[Read more…]

by Karl Burnett 1 Comment

The Maintenance Career of Diarist Samual Pepys

Samuel Pepys is famous for keeping a diary from 1660 to 1669. He recorded details of everyday life in London during the Restoration period, including firsthand accounts of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Pepys spent most of his career managing the Royal Navy’s logistics and shipbuilding programs during the second, third, and fourth Dutch wars. From 1673 to 1679, he was the Secretary for the Admiralty. He fought bureaucratic waste and endemic bribery while building the so-called “Thirty New Ships” of 1677. After infighting between political factions, Pepys resigned in 1679 to face trial for corruption himself.

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