July 2016 Edition

Recent Headlines:

Defense:

U.S. Army and Air Force Agonize Over Picking a New Handgun – Popular Mechanics

The Department of Defense will soon chose three finalists in a competition to be the U.S. Army and Air Force’s new sidearm. One of the three finalists could go on to outfit all of the services, with total sales of of 500,000 handguns.

Air Force Has Directed Energy Weapons; Now Comes the Hard Part – Air Force Times

The conference, hosted by defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a Washington think tank, brought together the best and the brightest minds to discuss advancements on directed energy.

F-35 Software Runs Smoothly During Mountain Home Deployment – Defense News

Software glitches have plagued the F-35 in recent months, but operators said they noticed a marked improvement during a June deployment where the aircraft did not experience any shutdowns.

GM and U.S. Navy Collaborating on Fuel Cell-Powered Underwater Unmanned Vehicles – Just Means

General Motors, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory are cooperating to incorporate automotive hydrogen fuel cell systems into the next generation of Navy unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs.

US Marine Corps Awards Raytheon up to $249 Million to Refurbish Vehicles – Raytheon

The U.S. Marine Corps Logistics Command has awarded Raytheon Company up to $249 million with options over five years for work on the Secondary Reparable, or SECREP program, rebuilding vehicle parts such as engines, transmissions and electronics.

Cooperative Research and Development Agreement: Laser Eye Protection – Coast Guard Maritime Commons

The Coast Guard announced its intent to enter into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Metamaterials Technologies USA Inc. to evaluate and test the advantages, disadvantages, required technology enhancements, performance, costs and other issues associated with LEP technology.

Cooperative Research and Development Agreement: Diesel Outboard Engine Development – Coast Guard Maritime Commons

The Coast Guard announced its intent to enter into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Cox Powertrain (Cox) to evaluate and test the advantages, disadvantages, required technology enhancements, performance, costs and other issues associated with diesel outboard engine technology.

U.S. Navy and Coast Guard Need More Icebreakers Now – Navy Times

The Cold War might be over, but the U.S. and Russia are once again in direct competition in the race to gain access to the Arctic and project force from the polar region.

Automotive:

These are the 25 Most Reliable New Cars of 2016 – Business Insider

J.D. Power released the latest edition of its “Initial Quality Study.”

Consumer Reports’ Best and Worst Car Brands in 2016 – Newsday

The Consumer Reports 2016 Car Brand Report Cards ranks automakers across the world by reliability, road test performance and other factors.

Reliability Scoring for the Automotive Market – Chip Design

The annual growth for car sales is typically in the single digits, but the electronic content inside those cars is rapidly expanding as we enter the age of the digital car.

Most Automakers Improve Reliability Scores in Car-Buyer Survey – The Denver Post

Despite adding sophisticated electronic safety features and touch screens that once were prone to glitches, most automakers improved their reliability scores this year in an annual survey of new-car buyers.

Buying a Car: Are Hybrids Less Reliable Than Gas-Powered Models? – Autotrader

If hybrid cars are less reliable than their more traditional gasoline-powered counterparts, firms that rate automotive reliability certainly haven’t heard about it.

Quality Drive Components Ensure Long Term Reliability in Automotive Assembly – Engineering Specifier

There are few more demanding production environments than on automotive assembly lines.

2016 Initial Quality Study: Reliability Still Tops List of Purchase Factors – J.D. Power

Nearly one-half (49%) of new-vehicle buyers and lessees cite “expected reliability” as the most important factor when purchasing a new car or light truck, according the J.D. Power 2016 U.S. Initial Quality StudySM (IQS).

Energy:

Quality, reliability and a track record: New video report from the SolarWorld 2016 Installer Summit – PV Magazine

Despite the rising dominance of third-party solar providers, much of the U.S. residential and commercial markets are still comprised of small- to mid-sized local installers.

Accidental Discovery: Coating Seems to Improve Reliability of Wind Power – The University of Akron

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Akron discovered that a particular form of carbon coating not necessarily designed for wind turbines may indeed prove a boon to the wind industry – a serendipitous finding that was recently highlighted in the journal Tribology International.

Mass Transit:

Trains Sidelined Over Cracks, Philly Commuters Crowd Aboard – WECT 6

Philadelphia’s main transit agency is looking to lease equipment from other states after sidelining 120 regional rail cars due to structural problems that don’t appear to have any quick fix.

$14.8 billion transit budget seeks to boost reliability – Boston Globe

More than half of the $14.8 billion the state transportation department and the MBTA plan to spend on large-scale projects over the next five years will go toward improving the reliability of the public transit and highway systems.

Flooding, Closures and Electrical Meltdowns: The Nation’s Worst Public Transit Systems – Market Place

D.C. metro riders can’t catch a break. Thunderstorms and heavy rain flooded the Cleveland Park station Tuesday, temporarily shutting down access to the residential neighborhood.

Space/Aviation:

Vibration Monitoring Keeps Aviation Fuel Flowing – Maintenance Technology

At busy airports around the world, the ability to provide a constant, reliable supply of aviation fuel is key. For one major international airport, this responsibility falls to a single fuel-services provider. It stores all aviation fuel transferred to the airport and is the facility’s only fuel-receiving terminal.

Estimating Orion Heat Shield Failure Due To Ablator Cracking During The EFT-1 Mission – NASA

The Orion EFT-1 heatshield suffered from two major certification challenges.

NASA’s Response to SpaceX’s June 2015 Launch Failure: Impacts on Commercial Resupply of the International Space Station – NASA

NASA’s Response to SpaceX’s June 2015 Launch Failure.

NASA Investigation into SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Explosion Questions Single Strut Theory – Parabolic Arc

While SpaceX blames a faulty strut supplied by a contractor for the explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket in June 2015, an independent investigation by NASA Launch Services Program (LSP) concluded there were several “credible causes” for the accident, including poor quality control at Elon Musk’s launch company.

Medical/Health:

New Law Could Help Protect Patients From Devastating Medical Device Failures – Fortune

Doctors may have a new duty to report flaws with medical devices to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration if a new law introduced in Congress Wednesday passes.

Flexible 3D Circuits Power Medical Devices – Connector

As populations age in developed countries, demand for healthcare is growing and medical practitioners need new ways to deliver care more cost effectively.

Reliability Assessment of an Innovative Wound Score – WOUNDS

The authors describe an innovative wound score and demonstrate its versatility for scoring a variety of wound types in addition to diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs). To further test its merits, they determined its interobserver reliability in a prospective series of patients.

Industrial:

IoT Devices Call for More Reliable Uptime – Belden

The Internet of Things (IoT) is coming fast, and is set to reshape everything from healthcare to manufacturing.

Electronics:

Leadless Packages with Enhanced Board Level Solder Joint Reliability for Automotive Application – ST

This application note explains stress mechanism on board level soldering joint when subjected to thermal cycling and introduces PCB design guideline to optimize soldering process, thermal performances and hence reliability.

Improving Ceramic Capacitor Reliability in Automotive Applications – Engineering Center

The ability to withstand vibration is one factor that has a significant influence on the selection of capacitors for automotive applications, including under-the-hood, for purposes such as filtering, to be used as a decoupling capacitor, transient-voltage-suppression and energy storage.

Software:

Optimal Release Planning and Software Reliability Modeling for Multi-Release Software – IJETTCS

Reliability of Software has been major Issue in Software industry. Failure Free Code Development is to be achieved with in time of Software version upgrades.

Towards Early Software Reliability Prediction for Computer Forensic Tools – Springer Open

The approach of assessing component-based tool reliability in the COSMIC-FFP context is illustrated with the Forensic Toolkit Imager case study.

Dynamically Weighted Combination of Fault – Based Software Reliability Growth Models – INDJST

The objective of this research paper is to propose a dynamically weighted fault based combination model for application during this phase of reliability growth testing of software systems.

Human Factors:

Human Factors and Usability Engineering – Guidance for Medical Devices Including Drug-device Combination Products – MHRA

The guidance will complement the work being carried out by the NHS to apply human factors approaches in the ergonomic design of healthcare workplaces and practices.

FDA Advises Adamis Pharmaceuticals To Expand Human Factors And Reliability To Support Its NDA For Epinephrine Injection – Benzinga

Adamis Pharmaceuticals Corp revealed Monday it was advised by the FDA to expand its human study, as well as reliability student, i.e. product stress testing, to get its support for its NDA for Epinephrine injection.

Variances and Human Factors in Radiographic Image Interpretation – Quality Magazine

As conventional film radiographic testing continues transitioning to the digital or computed RT process, the POD method of analysis is likely to improve significantly.

HSE&T Corner: Human-Centered Design Pushes Reliability, Safety for Offshore Drilling – Drilling Contractor

At Transocean, the company is using the concept of human-centered design to guide the development of a new subsea-related technology.

The Human Factor IoT Takes People Out of the Loop – Electronic Engineering Journal

The imminent IoT is the final phase of a computing revolution that began decades ago.

Sensors:

Reliability Evaluation for Clustered WSNs under Malware Propagation – MDPI

We consider a clustered wireless sensor network (WSN) under epidemic-malware propagation conditions and solve the problem of how to evaluate its reliability so as to ensure efficient, continuous, and dependable transmission of sensed data from sensor nodes to the sink.

Research:

Effects of Scan Length and Shrinkage on Reliability of Resting-State Functional Connectivity in the Human Connectome Project – ARXIV

In this paper, we use data from the Human Connectome Project (N = 461) to investigate the effect of scan length on reliability of resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) estimates produced from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI).