The physics of failure (POF) is an approach to designing reliable products to avoid failure, based on the knowledge of root cause failure mechanisms. It is based on failure reliability technology that studies the failure regularities from the failure reasons and failure mechanisms of the products. A clear understanding of the physics-of-failure is necessary in applications that afford little op...

In a system subject to both repairable and catastrophic (i.e., nonrepairable) failures, ‘mission success’ can be defined as operating for a specified time without a catastrophic failure. We examine the effect of a burn-in process of duration t on the mission time x, and also on the probability of mission success, by introducing several functions and surfaces on the ðt; xÞ-plane whose extrema re...

For a manipulator operating in a hazardous or remote environment, an important concern is its capability after a component failure, since retrieval or repair is not always possible. Methods have been presented in the literature for optimizing capabilities after specific types of failures. However, techniques for achieving failure tolerance when conversion between failure types is possible has n...

An ontology for representing operating, safety and control procedures is proposed in this paper that supports diagnosis based on following these procedures and combining observed malfunctions with Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) information. The procedure ontology is defined within interconnected components of the process plant, diagnostic analysis (where the FMEA is described) and pro...

When designing aerospace systems, it is essential to provide crucial failure information for failure prevention. Failure Modes and Effects types of analyses and prior engineering knowledge and experience are commonly used to to determine the potential modes of failures a product might encounter during its lifetime. When new products are being considered and designed, this knowledge and informat...

Modern embedded systems contain complex structures, as they are composed of many subsystems. Maintaining such systems requires collaboration between the engineers who designed them and the engineers who analyzed the failures in them. In this paper we present our proposed visual platform ESSAVis, a 2Dplus3D environment, to help both kinds of engineers in understanding the failure mechanisms of s...

One approach to the study of wear involves the ch~~te~zation of surface failure under conditions of single-pass sliding. Such an approach has been used to show that the wear of commercial and experimental restorative resins and composites is determined by the resistance of the material to penetration and by the mode of deformation during sliding [l] . The purpose of this investigation was to ch...

The face stability of shallow tunnels was investigated with small-scale model experiments at single gravity. Aim of the research was to detect the evolution of failure mechanisms in dense and loose soil samples with varying overburden above the tunnel. Moreover, the quality of proposed theoretical/numerical approaches for the determination of a necessary support pressure pf was assessed. The re...

Over the past three years, BMW has undertaken a significant project to first investigate, then proceed with migration from its present crash simulation software to ABAQUS. This project has been motivated by a growing recognition within BMW that, in order to advance its crash simulation methods, improved robustness in the software employed, along with a greater emphasis on physically-motivated s...

In this paper an attempt is made to offer insights into local slope failure mechanisms from the perspective of hydrogeology. The hypothesis examined envisages that the hydraulic conductivity distribution in a weathered profile includes a relatively high hydraulic conductivity zone associated with the jointed rock mass near rockhead. There is evidence locally for such a condition. The groundwate...