What Is HALTHighly accelerated life testing (HALT) is a technique to expose weaknesses or faults with a product. HALT uses individual or combined stresses in a step-stress approach to quickly apply sufficient stress to reveal defects. Continue reading
Reliability or life testing involves estimating the expected durability over time of an item. This may be an entire system, a product, or an individual component. We may also focus on an element of a component, such as a material property. At the end of the testing we want to say something meaningful about the expected performance over time. Continue reading
Why do so many avoid failure? In product development of plant asset management, we are surrounded by people who steadfastly do not want to know about nor talk about failures.
Failure does happen. We cannot ignore this simple fact. Continue reading
The concept of a maturity model is not new. A maturity model provides a means to identify the current state and illuminate the possible improvements to a reliability program. The matrix serves a guide to assist an organization in improving its program.
The matrix has five stages. In general, the higher stages are most cost effective and efficient at achieving higher rates of product reliability performance. These stages—uncertainty, awaking, enlightenment, wisdom, and certainty—are described in the following. The complete matrix is posted at http://accendoreliability.com/reliability-maturity. Continue reading
Worst-case tolerance analysis is the starting point when creating a tolerance specification. It is a conservative approach as it only considers the maximum or minimum values of part variation—whichever leads to the worst situation. Setting tolerances such that the system will function given the expected variation of manufactured components improves that ability of the system to perform reliably. Continue reading