Abstract

Kirk and Fred discuss the subject of reliability and how appliance manufacturing companies may design for a limited life in order to sell new models.

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss the need for companies need to sell the new models of their products and the planned or known wear out after the period of acceptable use.
Topics include:

• Many reasons people buy new appliances and cars is because of the new features, which in clothes washing machines is more efficient water use, and in automobiles it is safety systems and gas mileage.
• If  a major appliance fails after a 10+ years life of service, where do you go for information on the replacement.  Kirk relies on Consumer Reports because every year it sends a product survey on their years old product asking about it’s reliability.
• Engineering any product or system is a series of tradeoffs and especially with costs and wear out of mechanical components. Occasionally a company produces an extremely reliable systems that make it difficult to get the customer to replace it, and Kirk has experienced this first hand as a Sales Engineer selling helium mass spectrometers, a.k.a helium leak detectors.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

Show Notes

Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled  “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”. It is in the public domain, so please distribute freely. Trying to predict reliability for development is a misleading a costly approach.

You can now purchase the most recent recording of Kirk Gray’s Hobbs Engineering 8 (two 4 hour sessions) hour Webinar “Rapid and Robust Reliability Development – 2022 HALT & HASS Methodologies Online Seminar” from this link.

For more information on the newest discovery testing methodology here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz.