Design Reliability

A unique, design-based approach to reliability engineering Design for Reliability provides engineers and managers with a range of tools and techniques for incorporating reliability into the design process for complex systems. It clearly explains how to design for zero failure of critical system functions, leading to enormous savings in product life-cycle costs and a dramatic improvement in the ability to compete in global markets. Readers will find a wealth of design practices not covered in typical engineering books, allowing them to think outside the box when developing reliability requirements. They will learn to address high failure rates associated with systems that are not properly designed for reliability, avoiding expensive and time-consuming engineering changes, such as excessive testing, repairs, maintenance, inspection, and logistics. Special features of this book include: A unified approach that integrates ideas from computer science and reliability engineering Techniques applicable to reliability as well as safety, maintainability, system integration, and logistic engineering Chapters on design for extreme environments, developing reliable software, design for trustworthiness, and HALT influence on design Design for Reliability is a must-have guide for engineers and managers in R&D, product development, reliability engineering, product safety, and quality assurance, as well as anyone who needs to deliver high product performance at a lower cost while minimizing system failure.

As engineering systems become more and more complex, industry has recognized the importance of system and product reliability and places ever increasing emphasis on it during the design phase. Despite its efforts, however, industry continues to lose billions of dollars each year because of unexpected system failures. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for designers and engineers to have a solid grounding in reliability engineering and keep abreast of new developments and research results.

System reliability, availability and robustness are often not well understood by system architects, engineers and developers. They often don't understand what drives customer's availability expectations, how to frame verifiable availability/robustness requirements, how to manage and budget availability/robustness, how to methodically architect and design systems that meet robustness requirements, and so on. The book takes a very pragmatic approach of framing reliability and robustness as a functional aspect of a system so that architects, designers, developers and testers can address it as a concrete, functional attribute of a system, rather than an abstract, non-functional notion.

Today's marketplace demands product reliability. At the same time, it places ever-increasing demands on products that push the limits of their performance and their functional life, and it does so with the expectation of lower per-unit product costs. To meet these demands, product design now requires a focused, streamlined, concurrent engineering process that will produce a product at the lowest possible cost in the least amount of time. Design for Reliability provides a systematic approach to the design process that is sharply focused on reliability and firmly based on the physics of failure. It imparts an understanding of how, why, and when to use the wide variety of reliability engineering tools available and offers fundamental insight into the total design cycle. Applicable from the idea phase of the product development cycle through product obsolescence, Design for Reliability (DfR) concepts integrated with reliability verification and analytical physics form a coherent stage gate/phase design process that helps ensure that a product will meet customers' reliability objectives. Whether you are a high-volume manufacturer of consumer items or a low volume producer of military commodities, your goal is the same: to bring a product to market using a process focused on designing out or mitigating potential failure modes prior to production release. Readers of Design for Reliability will learn to meet that goal and move beyond solidifying a basic offering to the marketplace to creating a true competitive advantage.

This book contains probabilistic analyses and reliability-based designs (RBDs) for the enhancement of Eurocode 7 (EC7) and load and resistance factor design (LRFD) methods. An intuitive perspective and efficient computational procedure for the first-order reliability method (FORM, which includes the Hasofer–Lind reliability index) is explained, together with discussions on the similarities and differences between the design point of EC7/LRFD and RBD-via-FORM. Probability-based designs with respect to the ultimate and serviceability limit states are demonstrated for soil and rock engineering, including shallow and deep foundations, earth-retaining structures, soil slopes, 2D rock slopes with discontinuities, 3D rock slopes with wedge mechanisms, and underground rock excavations. Renowned cases in soil and rock engineering are analyzed both deterministically and probabilistically, and comparisons are made with other probabilistic methods. This book is ideal for practitioners, graduate students and researchers and all who want to deepen their understanding of geotechnical RBD accounting for uncertainty and overcome some limitations and potential pitfalls of the evolving LRFD and EC7. Solutions for the book’s examples are available online and are helpful to acquire a hands-on appreciation: https://www.routledge.com/9780367631390.

Industry underestimates the extent to which behaviour at work is influenced by the design of the working environment. Designing for Human Reliability argues that greater awareness of the contribution of design to human error can significantly enhance HSE performance and improve return on investment. Illustrated with many examples, Designing for Human Reliability explores why work systems are designed and implemented such that "design-induced human error" becomes more-or-less inevitable. McLeod demonstrates how well understood psychological processes can lead people to make decisions and to take actions that otherwise seem impossible to understand. Designing for Human Reliability sets out thirteen key elements to deliver the levels of human reliability expected to achieve the return on investment sought when decisions are made to invest in projects. And it demonstrates how investigation of the human contribution to incidents can be improved by focusing on what companies expected and intended when they chose to rely on human performance as a barrier, or control, against incidents. Recognise some ‘hard truths’ of human performance and learn about the importance of applying the principles of Human Factors Engineering on capital projects Learn from analysis of real-world incidents how differences between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ styles of thinking can lead to human error in industrial processes Learn how controls and barrier against major incidents that rely on human performance can be strengthened throughout the design and development of assets and equipment

· Introduction.· Reliability Measures.· Static Reliability Models.· Probabilistic Engineering Design.· Combination of Random Variable's in Design.· Interference Theory and Reliability Computations.· Reliability Design Examples.· Time Dependent Stress-Strength Models.· Dynamic Reliability Models.· Reliability Estimation: Exponential Distribution.· Reliability Estimation: Weibull Distribution.· Sequential Life Testing.· Bayesian Reliability in Design and Testing.· Reliability Optimization.· Author Index.· Subject Index.