1. What is Reliability? And give the importance of reliability engineering.

The RELIABILITY of an item/system is the probability that the item/system performs a specified function
under specified operational and environmental conditions at and throughout a specified time.
Quantitatively, reliability is the probability of success. Usually expressed as Mean Time Between
Failures(MTBF)
The Reliability definition has four important elements:
1. Probability (A value between 0 and 1, number of times that an event occurs (success) divided by
total number trials) e.g. probability of 0.91 means that 91 of 100 items will still be working at
stated time under stated conditions
2. Performance (Some criteria to define when and how product fails, which also describes what is
considered to be satisfactory system operation) e.g. amount of beam collisions, etc
3. Time (system working until time (t), used to predict probability of an item surviving without failure
for a designated period of time)
4. Operating conditions These describe the operating conditions (environmental factors, humidity,
vibration, shock, temperature cycle, operational profile, etc.) that correspond to the stated product
life.
What is Reliability Engineering?
o Focuses on eliminating maintenance requirements.
o Utilizes technology analysis to achieve reliability and maintenance task improvements.
o Improves the uptime and productive capacity of critical equipment using formalized problem-solving
technique

Importance of Reliability Engineering

Reliability engineering or the work to minimize failures, improve maintenance effectiveness, shorten repair
times, and meet customer & organization expectations has many benefits..

1. Expectation

Products work under environmental and use conditions imposed by the customer. Creating a product that
matches the expectations imposed by the customer permits the product to work as expected.

Understanding the conditions allows the design to meet without over designing thus optimizing product cost
and customer satisfaction.

2. Time

Unanticipated failures cost time for customers and for the organization to resolve the failures. Using
reliability and availability concepts we can minimize failures and avoid wasting time.

3. Throughput

Downtime for any reason reduces the systems throughput, downtime can be minimized by applying
predictive and preventative maintenance programs.

A well-maintained system minimizes operating expenses and maximizes throughput.

4. Production

Some products require a run-in or burn-in to identify and eliminate early life failures or to refine and
optimize system operation. Using reliability engineering techniques we can minimize the time and resource
impact of run-in or burn-in operations.

Eliminating or minimizing the time we reduce inventory carrying costs, tooling costs, and energy
requirements.
5. Distribution

Fewer failures and optimized maintenance implies fewer spare parts in the logistics system.

This minimizes the distribution system costs for transportation, logistics, and storage for spare parts. This
also minimizes service labor costs.

6. Warranty

Products that operate as expected without failure avoid being returned or serviced under warranty.

Calls to service support, troubleshooting, product returns, failure analysis, and re-engineering all part of the
cost of unreliability.

The warranty provides customers insurance in case of failure and with reliability engineering techniques the
costs are minimized.

7. Safety

Some product failure cause unintended or unsafe conditions leading to loss of life or injury. Reliability
engineering tools assist in identifying and minimizing safety risks.

8. Liability

Product failures can cause the loss of property. Minimizing failures and mitigating the damage caused by
any failure minimizes the exposure to liability for the property loss.

9. Design

Enhancing the design teams reliability engineering capabilities through training and staffing of reliability
professionals enables the entire team to make decisions fully considering the impact on product reliability.
This reduces the need for expensive redesign or rework costs to address reliability related design errors.

There are more ways reliability engineering is of value, yet this list provides importance of reliability
engineering. We master the tools and techniques so we can make a difference. Reliability has broad and
important impact across the product lifecycle.
2. List out various activities in reliability engineering.
The following are the some of the activities in reliability engineering.
1. Maintenance prevention
2. Life cycle cost
3. Economic of reliability
4. Proactive maintenance
5. Capital equipment replacement
1. Maintenance prevention
The goal of maintenance prevention (MP) is to reduce maintenance costs and deterioration losses in new
equipment by considering past maintenance data and the latest technology when designing for higher
reliability, maintainability, operability, flexibility, safety, and other requirements
o Maintenance prevention activities are conducted during the stages of:
o Equipment design
o Fabrication
o Installation and test run
o Commissioning ( establishing normal operation with commercial production)
o Include debugging at each stage ( detecting and correcting errors and malfunctions)
o Production and maintenance departments must join forces with the design department to form a
project centered engineering department.
Design with respect to the following issues:
o Quality
o Productivity
o Operability
o Energy-saving
o Cost
o Maintainability
o Safety and environment
Aim is to front end load maintenance improvements so that troubles (repairs, inspections, adjustments,
lubrication, cleaning, tightening) during start-up and commissioning are minimized.
Use of standard checklists at each stage
2. Life cycle cost
One of the major considerations in establishing system reliability is life cycle costs. Life-cycle costing is the
process of determining all relevant costs from conceptual development through production, utilization, and
phase-out. It is the total cost of ownership. Our interest in discussing life- cycle is to ensure that those costs
affected by our choice of design variables, especially reliability (and later maintainability), are properly
accounted for. There are many different ways to establish life-cycle costs categories
In performing design trade-offs, total life-cycle costs of each alternative design should be estimated and
compared. At the highest level, a life cycle cost model may take on the following form:
Life-cycle cost = acquisition costs + operation costs + failure cost + support costs net salvage value
Where, Net salvage value = salvage value- disposal cost
3. Economics of reliability
The reliability and maintainability program must pay for itself. How much reliability and maintainability
should be designed into a product depends to a large degree on the cost (or profits) to be realized from the
operational use of the product.
The revenue and life-cycle cost model presented here is more comprehensive than the earlier models.
Nevertheless, it is only an example of the many forms that such models may take. Our focus not
surprisingly, is on those costs affected by the system reliability and maintainability.
Figure 5.1 shows the total cost curve as the sum of the acquisition cost curve and the cost-of failures curve.
Acquisition cost includes the cost of implementing and operating a reliability program in addition to the overall
development and production cost associated with the product. Acquisition cost consists of direct material and
labour costs as well as indirect costs such as taxes, insurance, energy, production facilities and equipment, and
overhead costs such as administrative, marketing, and product development costs. It is the product
development that generally involves the engineering staff. Acquisition costs are increasing functions of
reliability, not only because more organizational resources must be committed to achieve a higher reliability,
but also because the material and production costs of the product must increase as well. This may be a result
of more costly parts selection, added redundancy, stricter tolerances, excess strength, and increased quality
control and inspection sampling during manufacture. The cost of failures may include warranty costs, liability
costs, replacement or repair costs, the cost of the infrastructure necessary to support operational failures, and
the loss of future profit (market share) as a result of loss of customer goodwill. These costs obviously decrease
as reliability improves. The sum of the acquisition costs curve and the costs-of failures curve, shown in Figure
5.1, represents the desired reliability level. If the minimum cost point exceeds critical reliability, for example,
to meet a safety or contractual requirement, then it is desired level of reliability. Otherwise, the minimum
reliability becomes the desired level. If a safety or liability cost associated with injury or loss of life can be
quantified, it also can be included as a failure cost. Often, however, we are unable or unwilling to assign a
cost to an injury or death, and we must be content to establish a lower bound on safety-related reliability
parameters.
4.Proactive maintenance
Proactive maintenance is maintenance work performed in order to avoid failures or to identify defects that
could lead to failure. It includes routine preventive and predictive maintenance activities and work tasks
identified from them. The proper use of proactive maintenance helps prevent loss of productivity due to broken
or inoperable machines, which can save a company a great deal of money.

Proactive maintenance enacts corrective actions aimed at the sources of failure. It is designed to extend the
life of mechanical machinery as opposed to:

Making repairs when nothing is broken

For example, through research it can be determined that a certain machine is most likely to fail due to
contaminants in lubricating fluid. Once this is understood, then different proactive maintenance methods can
be used to ensure the fluid is clean to begin with and remains clean throughout operation. If contaminants are
detected within the lubricant, then it can be flushed out and replaced with clean fluid that helps prevent
machine breakdown.
A proactive maintenance plan gives a manufacturer the ability to prolong the life of machinery and prevent a
complete and unexpected breakdown of production. A proactive maintenance plan allows an organization to
schedule production shutdowns for repairs, inspection and maintenance.
5. Capital equipment replacement
The timing of replacement of equipment is dependent on factors like replacement costs, discount factors and
differences in productivity, reliability and safety of existing and new equipment