Reliability Engineering

An Overview of Reliability Engineering

The success rate probability of a business is highly dependent on the Reliability of the product being marketed. The product's Reliability establishes the company's reputation and is directly proportional to the company's branding. The purpose of Reliability Engineering is to help reliable market products to increase the loyalty of a customer and to help build a customer base for the growth of the business.

Reliability Engineering identifies and manages asset reliability risks that can adversely affect plant or business operations. Its primary roles are loss elimination, risk management, and Lice Cycle Asset Management. Under Loss Elimination, Reliability Engineering tracks the production losses and abnormally high maintenance cost assets and finds ways to reduce those losses or high costs. It develops a plan to eliminate or reduce the losses via root cause analysis, then obtains approval of a such plan and facilitates the implementation. And then, under Risk Management, Reliability Engineering manages the risk to the achievement of an organisation's strategic objectives in areas of environmental health, safety, asset capability, quality and production. For identifying and reducing any risk, reliability engineering includes the following:

• Preliminary hazards analysis
• Failure modes and effects analysis
• Criticality analysis
• Simplified failure modes and effects analysis
• Fault tree analysis
• Event tree analysis 

Reliability Engineering is involved in the design and installation of projects for new assets and the modification of the old ones. 

Reliability Engineering is considered as engineering that aims at dependability in the life cycle management of a product. Reliability is ability of a product or a system to perform or work the required functions without any failure for a specified time period and used under any specified conditions. And at the same time, engineering and analysis techniques are used to improve the Reliability or dependability of such product or system. 

Objectives of the Reliability Engineering

The main objectives of Reliability Engineering are as follows:

• To apply engineering knowledge and technique (specialist) to prevent or reduce the likelihood or frequency of failures
• To identify and correct causes of failures occurring despite the efforts to prevent them
• If the cause of failures is not fixed, then determine ways of coping with such failures.
• To apply methods to estimate the likely Reliability of new software and to analyse reliability data. 

Benefits of Reliability Engineering

The Reliability Engineering Certificate provides the following benefits -

• Enhances reputation
• Ensures Customer Satisfaction
• Improves Product Cost-Effectiveness
• Ensure the Reliability and maintainability of any new and modified installations
• Development of designs and specifications installation with commissioning plans
• Assures adherence to functional specifications
• Ensures the Reliability and maintainability of equipment, processes, facilities, utilities, controls and safety or security systems.
• Defines, designs, monitors, develops and refines the Asset Maintenance Plan.  
• Develops engineering solutions to repetitive problems and failures that adversely affect the plant operation. 
• Provides technical support to production, technical personnel and maintenance management. 
• Shows the manufacturer's seriousness about their products and customer satisfaction with the existing customers. 
• Helps in gaining advantages over competitors. 

Reliability Engineering Training 

The Reliability Engineering Training is also referred to as the "Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional" or CRMP, which is to assist professionals in understanding the various aspects of product development, such as design, prediction analysis, estimation, and performance demonstration of a product throughout its life cycle, for failure-free operation. The Reliability Engineering Training exposes professionals, both newly entered the market companies or already established companies, by providing theory and practical knowledge resulting in the improvement of reliability engineering skills.

Contents of a Reliability Engineering Training Course 

The CRMP of Reliability Engineering Training Programs contain the following mentioned contents -

Reliability Tools

Focuses on FEMA, FTA, RBD and Redundancy, along with the Boolean Truth Table Method, which assists in analysing and interpreting data of the market.

Life Data Analysis

Focuses on Maximum Likelihood Estimator, also known as MLE, which assists in the exponential distribution and the graphical method for the purpose of the Weibull-Normal distribution for predicting the life of the product.

Accelerated Life Testing

Focuses on ALT, which is short for Accelerated Life Testing, along with quantitative test methods with the inclusion of the Highly Accelerated Life Test, or HALT and Highly Accelerated Stress Screen, or HASS, which helps in finding defects in products by exposing them to multiple situations and conditions.

The Reliability Engineering Training Program is for people with an Engineering science or math background who are willing to learn and use these Reliability Engineering methods and techniques to do such reliability analysis and improvement. This program helps them to develop analytical skills, facilitate a better understanding of engineering principles, gain knowledge of Reliability Engineering techniques and testing methods and gain expertise in life data analysis and reliability calculations. 

Challenges for the Reliability Engineering

The most basic challenges one faces in reliability engineering are as follows:

• Poor quality of data because of the poor design or less management's involvement 
• More than expected delays in receiving data due to manual data capturing and feedback.
• Lack of discipline at the time of using systems 
• Poorly trained staff who do not understand the functionality or importance of using systems 
• Lack of participation of the required resources during root cause failure analysis 

Solutions for all such challenges can be summarised possible under the followings:

• Use of properly configured enterprise asset management systems and condition monitoring 
• Integration of datasets from various sources 
• Training and mentoring 
• Cultivating a culture of discipline and diligence 
• Defining the main performance indicators 
• Implementing structures and procedures