Starting salaries for engineers graduating from college this spring will be in the $50K neighborhood and even higher for the top students, as well as those with specialized experience. The degrees are typically electrical, electronics, mechanical, materials, civil, industrial, computer, and so on. Seldom is there a “reliability engineering” graduate. There are a few exceptions… Read More
Quanterion Solutions announces the release of a suite of engineering software tools called QuART for Quanterion Automated Reliability Toolkit. The suite represents the automation of many of the tools documented in a publication they previously coauthored, the Reliability Toolkit: Commercial Practices Edition. For more information or to purchase, Click here.
The goal of improving system reliability often presents a design paradox; “mission” reliability cannot be increased without simultaneously decreasing “logistics” reliability. When faced with the challenge of a system that has inadequate reliability to meet specification requirements, hardware redundancy is often implemented, leading to an improvement in one metric while degrading others.
For example, let’s say… Read More
Painful as it is to many of us, the generally desirable product characteristicReliability is heavily dependent on Probability and Statistics for measuring and describing its characteristics. This edition of Reliability Ques will only be the tip of the iceberg in this regard. Let’s start with a few basics:
Failure Distribution: this is a representation of the… Read More
There are many approaches that can be used to predict the reliability of an item. Sometimes when asked to provide a “quick estimate” of an item’s reliability, the use of field experience is overlooked, or if no failures have occurred, overly conservative estimates are made by assuming one failure. This article describes a simple approach… Read More
There are those who would argue that the costs of reliability activities associated with developing new products have little payoff. Whether we’re talking about commercial products or military systems, we don’t agree. Concepts like Life Cycle Costs, Total Ownership Costs, Reliability-based Maintenance, Performance-Based Logistics, and others clearly recognize the contribution of reliability activities in reducing… Read More
Reliability predictions are an important tool for making design trade-off decisions and estimating future system reliability. They are often used for making initial product support decisions such as how many spares are required to support fielded systems. Inaccurate predictions can lead to overly conservative designs and/or excessive spare parts procurement resulting in added life cycle… Read More
Quanterion Solutions Incorporated announces the release of the PRO version of the Quanterion Automated Reliability Toolkit (QuART PRO). The new product represents the expansion of its QuART set of tools to now include more than twenty automated tools and advisors in the field of reliability engineering. The PRO version, introduced at $189, is intended for… Read More
Whether your company is marketing commercial products or selling to the Government, warranties are an important ingredient to competitive success. Effective warranty planning can ensure success, but lack of attention to cost analyses can spell disaster. This article is intended to introduce the basics of warranties and to identify sources for more information.
A warranty is… Read More
A reliability model represents a clear picture of your product’s functional interdependencies providing a means to trade-off design alternatives and to identify areas for design improvement. The models are also helpful in:
Identifying of critical items and single points of failure
Allocating reliability goals to portions of the design
Providing a framework for comparing estimated reliability to product… Read More
