FREE WEBINAR - September 2, 2015 Host: Ops A La Carte Speaker: John Cooper, Senior Reliability Engineer and Instructor Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm Pacific TimeWhether you are in a startup company, pressed to meet a demanding schedule, or if you are in reliability engineering and are offering services to a startup, it’s important to understand how startup companies operate, and what their needs are in regards to product reliability. Many startups today are fast-paced, driven by young college grads, and often funded through crowdsharing. They may be sponsored by one of several well-known venture capital incubators. One of the challenges in modern reliability engineering is to help management and engineers understand the value and process of reliability engineering. In an electronic company, …
Reliability Analysis
Using a Warranty Event Cost Model to Drive Warranty Cost Reduction Strategy
FREE RELIABILITY EVENT Sept 10, 2014: Free Webinar 12pm-1pm PDT Using a Warranty Event Cost Model to Drive Warranty Cost Reduction Strategy Speaker: Robert Mueller Date: Wednesday, Sept 10, 2014 (12pm-1pm PDT) Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/605179322 Many organizations have become excellent at tracking both their product's field failures and determining component reliability for current products from field repair data. These component reliability and product field failure rates now need to be converted to fully loaded warranty costs. Only when the 'cost' of a component's failure is expressed in its fully burdened dollars can the relative importance & priority to mitigate that failure mode can best be evaluated. Putting it …
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Mechanical Failure Mechanisms and Reliability
Reliability Curves Mechanical failure can occur at any point in a product life cycle. These can be divided into infant mortality, constant failure rate, and wear out. As shown in the diagram, which is a plot of failure rate as a function of time, the individual curves of these three different classes of failure mechanisms sum together to form the classic bathtub curve of observed failure rate. Infant Mortality Infant mortality occurs early during product use. The failure rate declines as a function of time, so reliability actually increases until a point is reached where the constant failure rate becomes dominant and the infant rate becomes negligible. The Weibull Distribution is used to model the infant mortality period. A wear-in or burn-in period may be used to screen out …
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Functional Safety: Reliability Prediction vs. Reliability Demonstration
An adaption of the Functional Safety standards IEC 61508 and IEC 26262 by the European Union brought a new life into slowly fading activity of reliability prediction. Both reliability prediction and reliability demonstration are now key parts of many product development programs, however despite phonetic similarity those two have little in common as well as the result they generate. While reliability prediction is an analytical activity often based on mathematical combination of reliabilities of parts or components comprising the system; reliability demonstration is based on product testing and is statistically driven by the test sample size. Therefore the obtained results could drastically differ. For example, a predicted system failure rate of 30 FIT (30 failures per billion (109) …
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Robust Design and Reliability Activities
Robust Design & Reliability I delivered a webinar recently to describe the differences and similarities between robust design (RD) activities and reliability engineering (RE) activities in hardware product development . A survey we took from several hundred attendees indicated a diversity of opinions. About half the participants indicated they did not differentiate at all between the two methodologies. Approximately 20 % indicated they did differentiate between the two methodologies, and about 30% indicated that they did not know. I was quite surprised at the result, especially since participants came from working quality engineers, reliability engineers, engineering directors, system engineers, etc. Somewhere along the way, the differences and similarities …
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