Driven primarily by the US Department of Defense's shift toward decreasing replacement and maintenance cost of equipment, reliability analysis and reporting is increasingly required of its suppliers. Reliability engineering is a means of improving the dependability of equipment, while in turn ensuring troop safety by minimizing equipment failure and down time. Results of the analysis also aid military planners in budgeting and procurement tasks.

Located near Phoenix, Arizona, Proof Engineering provides reliability analysis and reporting to companies that supply mechanical and electromechanical products to the US government. We analyze your system part by part, evaluating the likelihood of failure of each component through mathematical calculations and/or FEA and then combine the results to an overall system reliability in terms of a mean time between failure (MTBF). In cases of poor reliability, we help you to problem solve and generate solutions to improve the reliability of your product.

 

In addition to satisfying requirements of DoD directive-type memorandum 11-003 (reliability analysis, planning, tracking, and reporting), knowing the reliability of your system is a useful internal tool for comparing designs, estimating warranty costs, and defining objectives for physical tests.

The parts count method is the simplest approach to obtaining overall system reliability. Either physics-based models or databases of failure rates may be used for each unique component. Because exhaustive test results are not always available, results of this type of analysis are often conservative. For instance, databases of failure rates such as NPRD 2011 assume one failure rate even though none may be observed due to time constraints.