Quality and reliability engineering

Quality and reliability engineering is becoming increasingly important because of the intense global competition and higher customer expectations. Manufacturers have to develop products with enhanced levels of quality and reliability in shorter product-cycle times at reduced costs. This raises lots of engineering and managerial problems. At the design phase of products, manufacturers have to determine the different quality and reliability requirements and translate them into the design requirements of products and production processes. At the production phase, the quality of products should be assured and monitored. Analytical tools (qualitative and quantitative) are needed for these tasks. Reliability and maintainability engineering is also fundamental to support planning of cost-effective maintenance of systems (e.g. machines within a manufacturing process, high-tech equipment, infrastructure systems, etc.) and the corresponding service logistics (spare parts inventory, repair crew and equipment). Asset-intensive industries are nowadays paying increasing attention towards smart maintenance of systems. The concepts and methods from reliability and maintainability engineering constitute the necessary foundations for smart maintenance in industry 4.0.

This course covers major topics in reliability and maintainability theory and quality control. With respect to reliability and maintainability theory, the course cover basic reliability models to fully characterize the reliability of components, evaluation of those models based on several failure and repair distributions, methods to evaluate the reliability and availability of multi-component systems, static and dynamic physical reliability models, methods to specify reliability and maintainability models from failure data. With respect to quality control, the course covers methods of statistical process control based on the use of process control charts for variables and attributes, and process capability analysis (specification limits, natural tolerance limits, calculation of nonconforming process outputs, process capability indices)

After having passed this course, students know a number of relevant concepts within the areas reliability and quality management as well as how to use a number of quantitative models and statistical methods for analyzing products and production processes with respect to reliability and quality. Specifically, students will be able to:

• Describe and distinguish the concepts of reliability, availability, maintainability of an item.

• Analyze the reliability of an item by applying the basic time-based reliability models and measures

• Analyze the reliability of an item by applying the reliability models and measures based on theoretical distributions in the following cases: (i) constant failure rate and (ii) time-dependent failure rate. Derive and apply repair-time distributions and maintainability measures to quantify the repair process of a failed item.

• Analyze the reliability and availability of a multicomponent system by applying the appropriate time-based reliability and availability models in the following cases: (i) independence between components’ failure modes, (ii) state-dependent systems.Analyze the reliability of an item as a function of its strength and the applied stress by applying the appropriate reliability models in the following cases: (i) single-load (static) and (ii) repetitive loads (dynamic).

• Given a data set of times to failure of an item, identify and derive the appropriate reliability and maintainability models by (1) deriving directly from the data the empirical reliability and hazard rate function, and (2) by fitting theoretical distributions to the available data. Assess if a process is in statistical control by applying the appropriate process control charts and control limits for variables and attributes.

• Assess the capability of an in-control process by applying the appropriate capability indices and the specification limits.

Additional information book chapters
Introduction: Concepts, terms and definitions of reliability, availability and maintainability ((Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 1)

Part I: Basic reliability models

• The failure distribution: reliability function, hazard rate function, mean time to failure, conditional reliability, bathtub curve ((Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 2)
• Constant failure rate models ((Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 3)
• Time-dependent failure rate models (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 4)
• Reliability of systems (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 5)
• State-dependent systems (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 6)
• Physical reliability models (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 7)
• The repair process (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 9)
• Availability of components and systems (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 11)

Part II: The analysis of failure data

• Data collection and Empirical methods (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 12)
• Identifying failure and repair distributions (Ebeling 3rd Edition Chapter 13)

Statistical quality control: control charts for variables and attributes and process capability analysis (Montgomery 6th Edition Chapter 15)

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master

• C.E. Ebeling (2019), An Introduction to Reliability and Maintainability Engineering, third Edition, Waveland Press Inc.
• D.C. Montgomery, G.C.Runger, (2014), Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers. 6th edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc