RSMT - Reliability, Safety, Maintenance and Testability,  RAMS - Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety

Safety and Reliability are major concerns for today's highly complex projects and must be considered at all stages of a system's development life cycle. An activity, which addresses both of these concerns is known as the Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) ....

What are the Aims of a FMECA?

The Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) identifies all of the possible failure modes within the scope of the system and then examines the effects of these failures and their potential consequences. The Criticality Analysis ranks these failures in terms of severity and allows us to focus on the requirements and design of the most safety critical parts of the system ....

We Will Analyse your systems using a pre-defined FMEA methodology at either block functional level or right down to board component level. Failure rate calculations, FMEA worksheets and summaries are used to make a Safety, Fault Tree and Availability Analysis. Reliability calculations determine if the required MTBF can be achieved ....

Where is a FMECA Relevant?

• Reliability/Safety              - identification of problem areas from a safety point of view
• Maintainability                 - how often a scheduled maintenance function needs to be performed
• Testability/Availability    - analysis and implementation of detection methods e.g. Built In Test (BIT) ....

How Should a  FMECA be Approached?

The Scope and Boundaries of the FMECA are identified, fault tree analysis and functional block diagrams are produced, an analysis of all potential failures is made, the effects and severity are identified, a safety criticality is assigned and the results are documented and used to improve the RSMT of the system being developed ....

Fault Tree Analysis is a top down method, which aids in identifying all of the possible causes of specific failures. The high level failure is broken down, via a hierarchical tree, into its different sources. These sources are coupled using logical gates e.g. a failure will occur when Event 1 AND Event 2 occurs OR if Event 3 occurs. Probability of events occuring can be assigned to each of the branches in the tree leading to a calculated value for the overall probability of that failure occurring ....

Functional Failure Analysis is a bottom up technique, which analyses all functions by considering single functional failures, their effects on the system and the hazards created. Diagrams can be used to construct paths of data through a system. These then highlight which processes combine to act on data, which may then contribute to a failure.

Would You Like More Information?

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