Using Failure Rate Functions to Drive Early Design Decisions
We have good requirements for the reliability of our design. We also have a preliminary design with ideas of how we’re going to manufacture it. Is our design idea good enough? Are there things we should do to improve its performance and reliability?
For a physical product, there are three general stages in its life cycle. In many cases the failure rates of physical products can be represented by a reliability bathtub curve. This curve is really a plot of a hazard rate function, also known as a failure rate function. We talk about data collection in the early design phase, what types of failures are typical for each phase, and design decisions we may make to improve our reliability, based on the failure rate function we plot for our system.
