Reliability Engineering
Reliability Engineering
Reliability Engineering
INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING
PULCHOWK CAMPUS
Reliability Engineering
February, 2013
Reliability Engineering
Reliability Engineering
What is Reliability?
The reliability of an item/ system is the probability that the item/system performs a
specified function under specified operational and environmental conditions at and
throughout a specified time.
Reliability engineering has not developed as a unified discipline, but has grown out of the
integration of a number of activities which were previously the province of the engineer.
Since no human activity can enjoy zero risk, and no equipment a zero rate of failure, there
has grown a safety technology for optimizing risk. This attempts to balance the risk against
the benefits of the activities and the costs of further risk reduction.
Similarly, reliability engineering, beginning in the design phase, seeks to select the design
compromise which balances the cost of failure reduction against the value of enhancement.
2
unwanted negative attention. Introducing reliability analysis is an important step in
taking corrective action, ultimately leading to a product that is more reliable.
Repeat Business. A concentrated effort towards improved reliability shows existing
customers that a manufacturer is serious about its product, and committed to
customer satisfaction. This type of attitude has a positive impact on future business.
Cost Analysis. Manufacturers may take reliability data and combine it with other cost
information to illustrate the cost-effectiveness of their products. This life cycle cost
analysis can prove that although the initial cost of a product might be higher, the
overall lifetime cost is lower than that of a competitor's because their product
requires fewer repairs or less maintenance.
Customer Requirements. Many customers in today's market demand that their
suppliers have an effective reliability program. These customers have learned the
benefits of reliability analysis from experience.
Competitive Advantage. Many companies will publish their predicted reliability
numbers to help gain an advantage over their competitors who either do not publish
their numbers or have lower numbers.
Just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a highly reliable product is only as good
as the inherent reliability of the product and the quality of the manufacturing process.
The design of safety-related systems (for example, railway signaling) has evolved partly in
response to the emergence of new technologies but largely as a result of lessons learnt from
failures. The application of technology to hazardous areas requires the formal application of
3
this feedback principle in order to maximize the rate of reliability improvement.
Nevertheless, all engineered products will exhibit some degree of reliability growth, as
mentioned above, even without formal improvement programs.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century designs were less severely constrained by the cost
and schedule pressure of today. Thus, in many cases, high levels of reliability were achieved
as a result of over-design. The need for quantified reliability-assessment techniques during
design and development was not therefore identified. Therefore failure rates of engineered
components were not required, as they are now, for use in prediction techniques and
consequently there was little incentive for the formal collection of failure data.
Another factor is that, until well into this century, component parts were individually
fabricated in a ‘craft’ environment. Mass production and the attendant need for
components standardization did not apply and the concept of valid repeatable component
failure rate could not exist. The reliability of each product was, therefore, highly dependent
on the craftsman/ manufacturer and less determined by the ‘combination’ of part
reliabilities.
Nevertheless, mass production of standard mechanical parts has been the case since early in
this century. Under these circumstances defective items can be identified readily, by means
of inspection and test, during the manufacturing process, and it is possible to control
reliability by quality-control procedures.
The advent of electronic age, accelerated by the second world war, led to the need for more
complex mass-produced component parts with a higher degree of variability in the
parameters and dimensions involved. The experience of poor field reliability of military
equipment throughout the 1940s and 1950s focused attention on the need for more formal
methods of reliability engineering. This gave rise to the collection of failure information
from both the field and from the interpretation of test data. Failure rate data banks were
created in the mid-1960s as a result of work at organizations such as UKAEA (UK Atomic
Energy Authority) and RRE (Royal Radar Establishment, UK) and RADC (Rome Air
Development Corporation US).
The manipulation of the data was manual and involved the calculation of rates from the
incident data, inventories of component types and the records of elapsed hours. This
activity was stimulated by the appearance of reliability prediction modeling techniques
which require component failure rates as inputs to the prediction equations.
The availability and low cost of desktop personal computing (PC) facilities, together with
versatile and powerful software packages, has permitted the listing and manipulation of
incident data for an order less expenditure of working hours. Fast automatic sorting of the
data encourages the analysis of failures into failure modes. This is no small factor in
contributing to more effective reliability assessment, since generic failure rates permit only
4
parts count reliability predictions. In order to address specific system failures it is necessary
to input component failure modes into the fault tree or failure mode analysis.
With the rapid growth of built-in test diagnostic features in equipment a future trend may
be the emergence of some limited automated fault reporting.
Some definitons:
Maintainability: The ability of an item, under stated conditions of use, to be retained in, or
restored to, a state in which it can perform its required function(s), when maintenance is
performed under stated conditions and using prescribed procedures and resources. It is
expressed as Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)>
Availability: Is the probability that a system is available for use at a given time- a function of
reliability and maintainability. It is operating time divided by load time, which is the
available time per day minus the planned downtime.
Failure: The termination of the ability of an item to perform its required function.
Inherent Availability
MTBF
Ai = MTBF+ MTTR
When equipment is in a failed state, it is no longer available for work, and its reliability
decreases. As the length of time in a failed state (downtime) increases, the maintainability
of the equipment decreases.
5
reliability effects of design changes and corrections. The different reliability analyses are all
related, and examine the reliability of the product or system from different perspectives, in
order to determine possible problems and assist in analyzing corrections and improvements.
Reliability engineering can be done by a variety of engineers, including reliability engineers,
quality engineers, test engineers, systems engineers or design engineers. In highly evolved
teams, all key engineers are aware of their responsibilities in regards to reliability and work
together to help improve the product.
The reliability engineering activity should be an ongoing process starting at the conceptual
phase of a product design and continuing throughout all phases of a product lifecycle. The
goal always needs to be to identify potential reliability problems as early as possible in the
product lifecycle. While it may never be too late to improve the reliability of a product,
changes to a design are orders of magnitude less expensive in the early part of a design
phase rather than once the product is manufactured and in service.
6
Loss Elimination
One of the fundamental roles of the reliability engineer is to track the production losses and
abnormally high maintenance cost assets, then find ways to reduce those losses or high
costs. These losses are prioritized to focus efforts on the largest/most critical opportunities.
The reliability engineer (in full partnership with the operations team) develops a plan to
eliminate or reduce the losses through root cause analysis, obtains approval of the plan and
facilitates the implementation.
Risk Management
Another role of the reliability engineer is to manage risk to the achievement of an
organization’s strategic objectives in the areas of environmental health and safety, asset
capability, quality and production. Some tools used by a reliability engineer to identify and
reduce risk include:
Maintenance Prevention
The goal of maintenance prevention (MP) is to reduce maintenance costs and deterioration
losses in new equipment by considering past maintenance data and the latest technology
when designing for higher reliability, maintainability, operability, flexibility, safety, and other
requirements.
7
4. Minimize future maintenance costs and deterioration losses of new equipment.
5. MP design process improves equipment reliability by investigation weakness in
existing equipment and feeding the information back to the designers.
At each stage of MP design possible problems with respect to the following issues need
to be examined.
- Quality
- Productivity
- Operability
- Energy-saving
- Cost
- Maintainability
- Safety and environment
References:
Nikolaidis, Efstratios et al (2005): Engineering Design Reliability Handbook. CRC Press
www.weibull.com