Reliability Rhythm #19

Adam Bomb

TGIF - Close out the week with some fun amp; stimulating video clips

This week in Reliability

Decoding the Reliability Engineering in the news

Prognostics

Engineers have been applying Prognostics to mechanical components for many years.

For example:

• Motors, increase in current or noise
• Mechanical pumps, progressive increase in vibration
• Thermal?systems, time to achieve?a set temperature
• Fluid systems, change in pressure

?

However, most industries building systems with mechanical components choose not to use prognostics because of the cost of the instrumentation within the product. Products that have on board “smarts” can choose to include diagnostics with less effort or expense. With advances in technology, the cost of the instrumentation is dropping. This not?only means that adding the hardware to support advanced?metrology is more feasible but that many of these components/systems may have already been added for other functionality and controls improvements in the product.?It doesn’t take much?brainstorming to find creative ways to use these existing sensory systems.

I worked with a? team on a diagnostics?program where we discovered we could use the microphone in the device to give an indication of the structural integrity of the plastic housing. Known sound levels would?produce a different frequency (sound) profile dependant on how rigid the plastic housing components were fastened to each other. ?A progression in sound profile would indicate that the fasteners or heat stakes were loosening, a common wear issue. ?The product had a wifi connection, so a rigidity status/warning could be communicated to the manufacturer. ?A “preventative maintenance or replace” email could then be sent to the customer far in advance of any performance issues. ?It was a software update that added?a prognostic function for an entire product line.

The biggest investment in creating a prognostic program is developing and implementing the “research” program that will profile these patterns of signals/indicators with system health. ?This can be a heavily iterative process.

The questions to be answered are…

• What failure modes are most common, we can’t monitor everything?
• What do failure modes of these systems?look like as they progress from healthy to complete failure?
• What are the outputs we should monitor to identify?the status of?these performance factors?
• What existing monitoring on the?system can be utilized and what opportunities are there?for adding metrology?

?

Let’s not overlook the gems just beneath our feet! With?or without a formal “test and analyze”?program to study the correlation of signals, outputs, and health, we can mine our historical data and look for relationships. ?Some scrubbing of available data sets and a little statistical correlation analysis can yield some very interesting relationships between already measured signals and impending failure.

Only a few correlations need to be identified for further investigation to kick off a strong prognostics program, with justification for further funding.

-Adam

Webinar Recording

In case you missed it: We launched our fourth book "Adam's The Perfect DFMEA" on May 29, 2024. A recording of the book launch webinar is available on our website.?

Watch the Book Launch Webinar here

Events

We are thrilled to inform you that the latest episode of our podcast, featuring your insightful conversation, has just been released today!

Your valuable insights and engaging discussion truly added immense value to our podcast, and we are excited to share it with our audience.

To make it easier for you to share the episode with your followers and network, we have included the following links:

1.??????Podcast Episode Link

?2.???????Blog Post Link

Feel free to help us spread the word about this episode by sharing it on your social networks.

If you have any questions or need further information, please don't hesitate to reach out. Once again, thank you for being a part of our podcast, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the episode!

Book Store

Do you have a few hours or a few days? We have books for both!

Connect with me on LinkedIn here for even more content and insights!