Accelerated life testing (ALT) provides a means to estimate the failure rate over time of a product without resorting to normal use conditions and the associated duration. In ALT, one uses a variety of methods to compress time. Continue reading
Reliability testing to determine what will fail or when the failures will occur can be expensive. Organizations invest in the development of a product and attempt through the design process to create a product that is reliable. The design process has many unknowns though. This includes uncertainties about materials, design margins, use environments, loads, and aging effects. Using the best practices of design for reliability will minimize this list of risks to product reliability, yet it will not resolve all the uncertainty. Continue reading
The Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System (FRACAS) is a closed-loop process whose purpose is to provide a systematic way to report, organize, and analyze failure data. Implementation of a FRACAS has increasingly become commonplace within industry. Today, multiple software solutions exist that provide all the functionality required of a FRACAS. Continue reading
In a previous posting, I addressed two types of failure: early life and random. By definition, early life failures occur early during the product lifecycle whereas random fails can occur at any time. Near the end of the product lifecycle appears yet another type of failure: wear-out failure. Continue reading
Previously, I discussed failure mechanisms and root causes and classified failure into three types based on when failures occur: early life, random, and wear-out. Here I will focus on the first two: early life and random failures. Continue reading