Abstract

Kirk and Fred discussing doing failure analysis and the challenges

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss the many different issues with doing a proper failure analysis
Topics include:

• Some failures do not require a lot of investigation such as when a fork lift punches a hole through a box carrying a batch of printers.
• A failed component doesn’t always mean that it was the cause of the failure, as many times in can be the result of external over-stress, and the failed component was a victim not a cause.
• Start with the least destructive analysis, such as inspection and x-ray, before going into more invasive methods.
• A good failure analysis lab that has many customers from a variety of industries can save significant time and costs as the staff may have seen many different failure mechanisms and know the most common causes of failure.
• Fred recalls the failure analysis of an optical drive and the resulting conclusions

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.

SOR 563 Tips on Failure AnalysisKirk Gray

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Show Notes

Here is a link to Kirk’s book co-authored with John J. Paschkewitz available from Amazon “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust Design of Electronics and Systems”

Here is the link to the US ARMY/CALCE PAPER presented at the 2013 RAMS conference event mentioned in this podcast– “Reliability Prediction – A Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach” . This is a government document that is in the public domain and should be distributed a read by any engineer that believes failure prediction methodology is useful or beneficial during product development.