Fault Tree Analysis: Providing Valuable Insights

Fault tree analysis (FTA) is useful in many sectors but especially in the fields of safety and reliability engineering because?fault tree analysis is often the best way to discover flaws in many different situations.

For example, fault tree analysis helps to uncover the series of events that lead to a flaw in a system or machine.

FTA is also applicable for demonstrating compliance with safety rules and regulations such as ADA.

Fault tree analysis also helps organizations minimize and optimize the resources that are being spent by the company as well as assist in the viewing, overhauling or redesigning systems.

Experts in this area believe that every fault tree analysis should be composed of three main elements:

• The diagram of the process
• The events that have happened and to which the diagram is being applied
• The connections (gates) between events

An important benefit of FTA is how the analysis provides a unique insight into the operation and potential failure of a system.

This allows the development team to explore ways to eliminate or minimize the occurrence of product failure. By exploring the ways a failure mode can occur by exploring the individual failure causes and mechanisms, the changes impact the root cause of the potential failures.

Analysts contend that a key step to successfully completing fault tree analysis is defining the system. This includes the scope of the analysis such as defining what is considered a failure. This becomes important when a system may have an element fail or a single function fails and the remainder of the system still operates.

Another key step is to identify the causes for top-level fault. By using logic gate symbols, team leaders can organize the causes that are responsible for the failure alone or the causes that require multiple events to occur before the failure occurs.

Want to learn more? Tonex offers Fault Tree Analysis Training, a 2-day course that teaches participants how fault tree analysis (FTA) is used in?system engineering and analysis practices such as reliability, maintainability and safety.?

FTA is a common method for safety assessments and probabilistic risk assessments (PRAs). A PRA is a systematic approach to risk and reliability analysis, which estimates risk, the likelihood of failure, and the magnitude of the consequences.

For more information, questions, comments, contact us.