Engineering Systems Reliability, Safety, and Maintenance

An Integrated Approach

B.S. Dhillon

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351662703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Controllo qualità in ingegneria

Today, engineering systems are an important element of the world economy and each year billions of dollars are spent to develop, manufacture, operate, and maintain various types of engineering systems around the globe. Many of these systems are highly sophisticated and contain millions of parts. For example, a Boeing jumbo 747 is made up of approximately 4.5 million parts including fasteners. Needless to say, reliability, safety, and maintenance of systems such as this have become more important than ever before. Global competition and other factors are forcing manufacturers to produce highly reliable, safe, and maintainable engineering products. Therefore, there is a definite need for the reliability, safety, and maintenance professionals to work closely during design and other phases.

Engineering Systems Reliability, Safety, and Maintenance: An Integrated Approach eliminates the need to consult many different and diverse sources in the hunt for the information required to design better engineering systems.

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

The history of the reliability field may be traced back to the early 1930s when probability concepts were applied to electric power generation-related problems [1,2]. During World War II, Germans applied the basic reliability concepts for improving reliability of their V1 and V2 rockets. During the period of 1945–1950, the US Department of Defense performed various studies concerning electronic equipment failure, equipment maintenance, repair cost, etc. As the result of these studies, it formed an ad hoc committee on reliability, and in 1952, the committee was transformed to a permanent body: the Advisory Group on the Reliability of Electronic Equipment. A detailed history of the reliability field is available in the study of Dhillon [3].

The history of the safety field may be traced back to the Code of Hammurabi (2000 BC) developed by a Babylonian ruler named Hammurabi. In modern times, in 1868, a patent was awarded for the first barrier safeguard in the United States [4]. In 1893, the US Congress passed the Railway Safety Act, and in 1912, the Cooperative Safety Congress met in Milwaukee, Wisconsin [4,5]. Additional information on the history of safety is available in the study of Dhillon [6].

Although humans have felt the need for maintaining their equipment since the beginning of time, the beginning of modern engineering equipment/system maintenance may be regarded as the development of the steam engine, in 1769, in the United Kingdom, by James Watt (1736–1819) [7]. In the United States, a magazine entitled Factory, which first appeared in 1882, has played an important role in the development of the engineering systems/equipment maintenance field [8]. A book on maintenance of railways was published in 1886 [9].

Needless to say, each year, billions of dollars are spent on engineering system reliability, safety, and maintenance around the world and engineering system reliability, safety, and maintenance has become a very important issue.

Over the years, a large number of publications directly or indirectly related to engineering system reliability, safety, and maintenance have appeared in the form of journal articles, conference proceeding articles, technical reports, etc. A list of over 335 such publications is provided in the Appendix section.

1.2 Engineering System Reliability, Safety, and Maintenance Facts, Figures, and Examples

Some of the facts, the figures, and the examples, directly or indirectly, concerned with engineering system reliability/safety/maintenance are as follows:

• Each year, the US industry spends around US$300 billion on plant maintenance and repair [10].
• As per Kane [11], in 1996, the direct cost of corrosion-related failures including maintenance in the US petroleum industry was US$3.7 billion per year.
• As per Backtrom [12], some studies performed in Japan clearly indicate that more than 50% of working accidents with robots can be attributed to faults in the control system’s electronic circuits.
• As per Herrmann [13] and Kletz [14], the number of persons killed because of computer system-related failures was somewhere between 1000 and 3000.
• In 1974, Turkish Airlines Flight 981 (aircraft type: McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10) crashed because of cargo hatch failure and control cable failures and caused 346 fatalities [15].
• In 2002, an Amtrak auto train derailed because of malfunctioning brakes and poor track maintenance near Crescent City, Florida, and caused four fatalities and 142 injuries [16].
• In 1991, United Airlines Flight 585 (aircraf...