Notes on:

Design For Reliability Course NASA Lewis Research Center

Design for Reliability Course, Nasa Lewis Research Center, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, instructors: Vincent Lalli, Michael Packard, 1995. (666 slides)

The complete tutorial slide set is available in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) form at: http://tkurtz.grc.nasa.gov/srqa/dfr.htm

This tutorial consists of a slide set that serves as an introduction to system reliability as taught by NASA. While it focuses on a fairly traditional reliability mathematics approach, it does do a reasonably good job of looking across the entire life cycle.

Topic coverage: (*** = emphasized; ** = discussed with some detail; * = mentioned)

Other topics: reliability math

Author Comments:

Purpose:
The purpose of this course is to introduce the concepts of Reliability and to provide an overview of Reliability Engineering methodology.

Objective:
The objective of this course is to instill in Engineers and Managers the benefits that the application of Reliability principles and practices can provide. Benefits such as reduction in design and development cycles, improved quality and safety, increased product life, reduced maintenance and warrantee costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Eushiuan Tran (etran+@andrew.cmu.edu) writes:

From reading the slides from the Design for Reliability course, I got a fairly good overview of what reliability is and the different concepts associated with it. It was well organized, stating the basic questions about reliability and then answering them. The points were clearly made and not too much detail was given. Since this course was given to engineers and managers in a short amount of time, it was important that they were not overwhelmed with too much information in the time they had. Concepts were clearly defined, and examples were given where appropriate. I had seen most of the information presented in the slides before, but for industry people who have never been exposed to any sort of reliability concepts, this course would be a good introduction. They will not become experts on any one topic in reliability engineering, but they will become familiar with the basic concepts. This way, people who were required to pick up some background on reliability will have done that; and for people that are more interested in it, they have seen the surface of it and are in a position to learn more about it on their own.

Contents:

   Description of Activity               Day 
1. Introduction/Overview                  1 
2. Reliability Preferred Practices        1 
3. Measuring Reliability                  1 
4. Types of Distributions                1&2 
5. Reliability Concepts                   2 
6. Reliability Block Diagrams             2 
7. Using Failure Data                     2 
8. Improving Reliability & Writing 
      Specifications                      2 
9. FMEA                                   3 
10. Fault Tree Analysis                   3 
11. Problem Reporting & Lessons Learned   3 
12. Reliability Testing Testing --
       Additional Information            3&4 
13. Reliability Growth                    4 
14. Software Reliability & Quality        4
    Software R&QA; Additional Information 
15. Reliability Management                4 
16. Maintainability                       4 

Sample Examination (Self Graded-Optional) 4
Examination Critique                      4
Course Evaluation                         4 
References

Go to: other tutorials | resource page

Philip Koopman: koopman@cmu.edu