Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Dust ingress into bearings is one of the great causes of premature bearing failure on bucket elevators. By selecting the right bearing housing and position, combined with this special dust seal arrangement, you can get quadruple the bearing life. The article provides the full details of the low pressure dust leak seal design along with a sketch of the successful set-up.
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Can’t you make better decisions informed by good evidence? If not, it may be that your data isn’t fit for its intended purpose.
In the first part of this blog mini-series, I point out that the data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose” and I list several reasons for “why”.
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Aside from meeting specific quality system standard requirements—such as those found in ISO 9001 or IATF 16949—well-designed quality system metrics also can serve as meaningful indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s various processes.
As a quality manager, I often consider how precisely our quality system objectives and other metrics describe the effectiveness of our systems. One metric I started using recently—overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)—has provided our management team with a composite measurable that encompasses three major branches of our operation: maintenance, production and quality.
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Eric Lof was born and educated in Sweden, moved to the United States in 1902, and worked for the Western Electric and General Electric Companies. Eric Lof published a series of articles on hydroelectric plants in 1913 in the Engineering Magazine. The Engineering Magazine helped spread the concepts of planning, efficiency, and scientific management. The magazine, for example, published the first Gantt charts in 1910.
Biofuel production and manufacturing facilities in the United States are increasing rapidly. On August 8, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R. 6) into law. The comprehensive energy legislation includes a nationwide renewable fuels standard (RFS) that will double the use of ethanol and biodiesel by 2012.
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This article discusses five ways to effectively facilitate block diagrams by conducting pre-session exchanges, asking powerful questions, using exercises that engage, anticipating disruption, and controlling the tempo. The foundations of systems thinking and facilitation apply to block diagrams because the analysis requires a group to establish the nature of separate and inter-related components.
When we look at the widely used and misunderstood tool of Root Cause Analysis (RCA), we should reflect its interpretation in our own environments. Think about it: when is RCA typically requested and applied in our environment? Based on my experience, it is typically requested and applied when:
Your team is developing a new downhole chemical injection valve for a client’s offshore well. The valve’s service life target reflects its electro-mechanical (EM) content and is much shorter than the well’s economic life. But the valve housing has an estimated structural service life that exceeds well economic life, so structural integrity will exist well beyond electro-mechanical failure. Will the shorter life of the electro-mechanical content satisfy client requirements?
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Any product is an assembly of components comprised of different materials. The reliability of the product depends on the reliability of the materials – their ability to withstand exposure to the use conditions without degrading to the point that the component or joint stops performing as needed.
There are two approaches for evaluating the reliability of materials: 1) product testing and 2) materials testing. Both involve exposing test samples to actual or simulated use conditions and evaluating the response of the test samples as a function of the amount of exposure to the test conditions. For example, exposure to thermal cycling between -40 and +40 °C or exposure to salt spray. [Read more…]
A comprehensive reliability engineering program for a new product is a large investment. Not just in dollars, but more importantly, in time. No matter if you are a Fortune 500 company or a startup in your second year, time is always the freight train bearing down on you without mercy. I am going to give you a simple recipe I use for making a highly reliable product when that train horn is blaring and only getting closer. [Read more…]
James Toney has more than thirty years of experience in the quality profession. His clients have included the U.S. Department of Labor, IRS, Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Navy, Housing and Urban Development, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Health and Human Services. Commercial clients included financial, telecommunications, hospitality, educational, and healthcare organizations.
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The data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose”. When asked about why there is an Enterprise Asset Management or Computerized Maintenance Management system, the answer varies. Here are some reasons we’ve heard:
Doing an RCM analysis is only half the battle for successful RCM Implementation. From the beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I share what you can do to get the results you want.
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The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. – Albert Einstein
In this article, we will discuss how to use brainstorming to enhance FMEA effectiveness, and when (and when not) to use brainstorming.