Approaches to Ensuring the Reliability and Safety

This chapter presents various ways to reliability ensuring. The philosophies fail-safe, safe-life and damage-tolerant are explained briefly, as well as deterministic and probabilistic approach. Then, the important methods are explained, such as allowable stress, use of standards, load and resistance factor design, probabilistic approach and proof testing

Characteristics of Reliability

The basic reliability characteristics are explained: time to failure, probability of failure and of failure-free operation, repairable and unrepairable objects. Mean time to repair and between repairs, coefficient of availability and unavailability, failure rate. Examples for better understanding are included

Diagnostics

This chapter explains the tasks of technical diagnostics and basic diagnostic quantities, such as the time of use, time of operation, structural parameters, operational parameters and cost indicators. The main kinds of diagnostics are described, as well as its advantages and drawbacks

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a simple procedure for systematic revealing of possible failures of structures or processes as early as in the design stage. The main steps of this procedure are explained. Classification of severity, frequency and possibility of early detection of the individual failure modes is shown, as well as the calculation of the risk priority number, which serves for finding the most dangerous causes of failures. The application of FMEA is shown on an example

Fault Tree Analysis and Reliability Block Diagrams

Fault tree analysis (FTA) strives to reveal all possible sources of critical failures. It starts from the most critical event (“top event”) and looks at its reasons, and continues in this way backwards to the initial events leading finally to the failure. So-called fault tree, plotted using the symbols of Boolean algebra can then be used for the construction of a reliability block diagram, which serves for finding the critical way and probability of failure. The principle of Markov analysis is explained as well

Maintenance

Various approaches to maintenance are explained: maintenance after failure (breakdown maintenance), preventive maintenance, on-condition maintenance, reliability centred maintenance (RCM), the use of technical diagnostics

Reliability Testing and Verification

This chapter describes various methods for reduction of uncertainties in the determination of characteristic values of random quantities (quantiles of normal and Weibull distribution, tolerance limits, linearly correlated data, interference method, Monte Carlo method, bootstrap method)

Basic Terms of Reliability

Basic terms are explained, such as reliability, failure, fault, limit state, quality, safety, repair, renewal, maintenance, availability and dependability, inherent and operational reliability

Multicriterial Condition Evaluation and Fuzzy Methods

This chapter describes various methods for reduction of uncertainties in the determination of characteristic values of random quantities (quantiles of normal and Weibull distribution, tolerance limits, linearly correlated data, interference method, Monte Carlo method, bootstrap method)